The VIVID function for numerically continuing periodic orbits arising from grazing bifurcations of hybrid dynamical systems

Periodic orbits of systems of ordinary differential equations can be found and continued numerically by following fixed points of Poincaré maps. However, this often fails near grazing bifurcations where a periodic orbit collides tangentially with a boundary of phase space. Failure occurs when the map contains a square-root singularity and the root-finding algorithm searches beyond the domain of viable values. We show that by instead following the zeros of a function that maps Velocity Into Variation In Displacement (VIVID) this issue is circumvented and there is no such failure. We illustrate this with a prototypical one-degree-of-freedom impact oscillator model by applying Newton’s method to the VIVID function to follow periodic orbits collapsing into grazing bifurcations. We also follow curves of saddle-node and period-doubling bifurcations of periodic orbits that issue from a codimension-two resonant grazing bifurcation. The VIVID function provides a simple alternative to the more sophisticated collocation method and enables periodic orbits and their bifurcations to be resolved easily and accurately near grazing bifurcations.