  In this letter we study variational obstacle avoidance problems on complete
Riemannian manifolds. The problem consists of minimizing an energy functional
depending on the velocity, covariant acceleration and a repulsive potential
function used to avoid a static obstacle on the manifold, among a set of
admissible curves. We derive the dynamical equations for extrema of the
variational problem, in particular on compact connected Lie groups and
Riemannian symmetric spaces. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the
proposed method.
