Roller Racer with Varying Gyrostatic Momentum: Acceleration Criterion and Strange Attractors

In this paper we investigate a nonholonomic system with parametric excitation, a Roller Racer with variable gyrostatic momentum. We examine in detail the problem of the existence of regimes with unbounded growth of energy (nonconservative Fermi acceleration). We find a criterion for the existence of trajectories for which one of the velocity components increases withound bound and has asymptotics $t^{1/3}$. In addition, we show that the problem under consideration reduces to analysis of a three-dimensional Poincaré map. This map exhibits both regular attractors (a fixed point, a limit cycle and a torus) and strange attractors.