Related papers: Synchronous motion in a devil's stick -- variation…
A liquid meniscus, a bending rod (also called elastica) and a simple pendulum are all described by the same non-dimensional equation. The oscillatory regime of the pendulum corresponds to buckling rods and pendant drops, and the…
In this paper we study an optimal control problem that is affine in two-dimensional bounded control. The problem is related to the stabilization of an inverted spherical pendulum in the vicinity of the upper unstable equilibrium. We find…
The Rattleback is a very popular science toy shown to students all over the world to demonstrate the non-triviality of rotational motion. When spun on a horizontal table, this boat-shaped object behaves in a peculiar way. Although the…
Many damped mechanical systems oscillate with increasing frequency as the amplitude decreases. One popular example is Euler's Disk, where the point of contact rotates with increasing rapidity as the energy is dissipated. We study a simple…
When a millimetric body is placed atop a vibrating liquid bath, the relative motion between the object and interface generates outward propagating waves with an associated momentum flux. Prior work has shown that isolated chiral objects,…
We numerically study a simple sliding system: a rigid mass pulled by a spring with a strong in-plane stiffness anisotropy and a small misalignment angle. Simulations show that the apparent stick phase appearing in this system is in reality…
The nonlinear response to an external electric field is studied for classical non-interacting charged particles under the influence of a uniform magnetic field, a periodic potential, and an effective friction force. We find numerical and…
The Kapitza-Dirac effect, which refers to electron scattering at standing light waves, is studied in the Bragg regime with counterpropagating elliptically polarized electromagnetic waves with the same intensity, wavelength, and degree of…
The study of the motion of a rigid body on a plane (RBP motion) is usually one of the most challenging topics that students face in introductory physics courses. In this paper, we discuss a couple of problems which are typically used in…
In a two-dimensional axisymmetric system, a symmetric self-propelled particle exhibits rotational or oscillatory motion from the consideration of the system symmetry. In the present paper, we studied the motion of a camphor disk confined in…
Directed motion of topological solitons (kinks or antikinks) in the damped and AC-driven discrete sine-Gordon system is investigated. We show that if the driving field breaks certain time-space symmetries, the soliton can perform…
The normal and the inverted pendulum continue to be one of the main physical models and metaphors in science. The inverted pendulum is also a classic study case in control theory. In this paper we consider a special demonstration version of…
Planar juggling of a devil-stick using impulsive inputs is addressed using the concept of discrete virtual holonomic constraints (DVHC). The location of the center-of-mass of the devil-stick is specified in terms of its orientation at the…
This paper is devoted to a detailed investigation of the perturbed pendulum-like motions of a heavy rigid body about a fixed point. Canonical variables that allow one to simplify the analysis of homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits are…
In the rod and hole paradox as described by Rindler (1961 Am. J. Phys. 29 365-6), a rigid rod moves at high speed over a table towards a hole of the same size. Observations from the inertial frames of the rod and slot are widely different.…
This paper presents an instability result of Hamiltonian systems associated with optimal swing-up control for a pendulum. The systems possess weak (higher-order) instability at the initial point of the swing-up control, the analysis for…
This paper presents mathematical modeling and numerical analysis of bifurcation and synchronization phenomena in a system of coupled oscillators driven by a finite-power energy source and generating two-dimensional stick-slip…
Presents a minireview of topics concerned with balancing in quiet (bipedal) standing, and balancing of a stick. In the focus is the apparent stochastic nature of the swaying of the human inverted pendulum.
Continuing the study of Hamiltonian pseudo-rotations of projective spaces, we focus on the conjecture that the fixed-point data set (the actions and the linearized flows at one-periodic orbits) of a pseudo-rotation exactly matches that data…
The inverted pendulum is a non-linear unbalanced system that needs to be controlled using motors to achieve stability and equilibrium. The inverted pendulum is constructed with Lego and using the Lego Mindstorm NXT, which is a programmable…