Complex balancing motions of an inverted pendulum subject to delayed feedback control (Q1888066)

Here, it is shown that an inverted pendulum that is balanced on a cart by linear delayed feedback control may exhibit small chaotic motion about the upside-down position. In periodic windows associated with this chaotic regime we find periodic orbits of arbitrarily high period that correspond to complex balancing motion of the pendulum with bounded velocity of the cart. This result shows that complex balancing is possible in a controlled mechanical system with a geometric nonlinearity even when control law is only linear. This is in contrast to other proposed models that require a nonlinear controller, such as round-off due to digitization. The complex motion is detected by studying homoclinic bifurcations of a reduced three-dimensional vector field near a triple-zero eigenvalue singularity. More generally, such dynamics should be expected in any system with a triple-zero singularity and reflection symmetry.