Digital Control as Source of Chaotic Behavior

In the present paper, we introduce and analyze a mechanical system, in which the digital implementation of a linear control loop may lead to chaotic behavior. The amplitude of such oscillations is usually very small, this is why these are called micro-chaotic vibrations. As a consequence of the digital effects, i.e. the sampling, the processing delay and the round-off error, the behavior of the system can be described by a piecewise linear map, the micro-chaos map. We examine a 2D version of the micro-chaos map and prove that the map is chaotic.