Semistability analysis of the chaplygin sleigh and nonsmooth mechanical oscillator

An appropriate notion for stability studies of dynamical systems with a continuum of equilibria is semistability. One approach to semistability investigation is based on the nontangency between the vector field and the set of equilibria. In this work, we introduce a novel way of verifying nontangency by computing an outer estimate of the direction cone and illustrate its application through two well-known second-order systems. The stable equilibria of both the systems are shown to possess the semistability property.©2014 by ASME.