Stability by KAM confinement of certain wild, nongeneric relative equilibria of underwater vehicles with coincident centers of mass and bouyancy

Abstract

Purely rotational relative equilibria of an ellipsoidal underwater vehicle occur at nongeneric momentum where the symplectic reduced spaces change dimension. The stability these relative equilibria under momentum changing perturbations is not accessible by Lyapunov functions obtained from energy and momentum. A blow-up construction transforms the stability problem to the analysis symmetry-breaking perturbations of Hamiltonian relative equilibria. As such, the stability follows by KAM theory rather than energy-momentum confinement.