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This question is a little vague, I'm afraid, because I'm not sure I expect there to be a complete answer; but there should be some sort of situations where it is possible.

Consider a Riemannian manifold $M$ of bounded geometry and positive injectivity radius, so that we have plenty of geodesically convex charts. Let $K\subset M$ be a regular closed subset (i.e. is equal to the closure of its interior) such that the boundary is rough -- say at best Lipschitz. For instance, take (the closure of) a corkscrew domain, an NTA domain, John domain etc. I'm even willing to just consider the interior corkscrew condition. Now I am interesting in applying results that would hold if $\partial K$ were contained entirely in a chart to 'larger' $K$. This means I need to cover $\partial K$ with geodesic balls, and in my setup I would like to take balls $B_i$ of half the radius (still covering) so that the closures of said smaller balls form a closed cover.

It is at this point my feeling for what might possibly go wrong fails me, and I have no idea if things can break at this point, due to bad behaviour of the intersection $\partial B_i \cap \partial K$, or what-have-you. As an example, this paper considers 'locally strongly Lipschitz domains', which have the pleasant property there exist transverse vector fields along the boundary, which I can see might ensure one could find 'nice' $B_i$ with 'nice' $\partial B_i \cap \partial K$. Ahlfors regularity seems to be prominent here.

To give a concrete idea of what I'm doing, I'm considering extension operators for functions on $K$ to functions on $M$, and hoping to work locally and then patch together by smooth partitions on unity. The trouble is, I don't know that, when I restrict to the local problem, I get something resembling a reasonable set under the chart map: it seems to me to depend on making sure I have charts whose boundaries intersect $\partial K$ in a nice way. Once I have that out of the way, I seem to be able to proceed without issue.

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm having a certain difficulty in identifying what precisely you are asking. Moreover, you don't need bounded geometry or positive injectivity radius to have geodesically convex neighborhoods around every point, this was shown by Whitehead already in the 30's - see e.g. my comment to Dmitri Pavlov's MO question: mathoverflow.net/questions/198882/… $\endgroup$ Commented Jun 11, 2016 at 17:27
  • $\begingroup$ The stuff about bounded geometry is for other reasons, ignore if not needed. The hope is that something is true analogous to the case of Lipschitz domains: one can cover the boundary by open sets such that the boundary is the graph of a Lipschitz function and one can work locally. Clearly one might not have a graph of a function, but it's the working locally I hope is true. I can imagine all sorts of things going wrong. $\endgroup$
    – David Roberts
    Commented Jun 12, 2016 at 3:09

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