Monitoring the Behavior of an Experimental Impacting System

Since monitoring all the state variables in dynamic experiments may be difficult or even impossible, and since it is desirable to reduce the coupling between the system under study and the measuring device to as low a level as possible, it is useful to assess novel data acquisition techniques. Furthermore, it is well established that topological information can be obtained from delay coordinate embedding, and thus, not all of the state variables, or even a continuous set of a single variable, need to be measured. In the case of impacting systems, the impacts can be viewed as discrete events which can then be used to reconstruct more general features of the behavior. The success of such reconstruction techniques will be assessed in this paper.