Homoclinic orbits in the dynamics of resonantly driven coupled pendula

We present a plethora of homoclinic and heteroclinic orbits that exist in the phase space of a weakly nonlinear model describing small oscillations of two resonantly driven coupled pendula. These orbits connect equilibria in a resonance band, which is contained in an invariant plane, and is born under perturbation out of a circle of equilibria. Their existence is shown by using a combination of the Melnikov method and singular perturbation techniques.