  A theory concerning the emergence and control of chaotic escape from a
potential well by means of autoresonant excitations is presented in the context
of generic, dissipative, and multistable systems. Universal scaling laws
relating both the onset and lifetime of transient chaos with the parameters of
autoresonant excitations are derived theoretically using vibrational mechanics,
Melnikov analysis, and energy-based autoresonance theory. Numerical experiments
show that these scaling laws are robust against both the presence of noise and
re-shaping.
