A Study on Straight-Line Tracking and Posture Control in Electric Bicycle

The development of automatic control for driving a bicycle is a challenging theme and is expected to be a human assist system. Previously, an acceleration-based method for stabilizing bicycle posture was proposed by the authors. In the experiments with this controller, the posture of the bicycle might be stabilized, but it is impossible to run on the desired trajectory, because there is no consideration with respect to a trajectory control. For the sake of expanding this system into more sophisticated equipment, a realization of the trajectory control for the bicycle is important. From the viewpoint of an assist system for human motion, a unified control of posture and trajectory brings a sophisticated function to a bicycle, and a high-performance bicycle is expected to be a convenient vehicle, similar to a small car. This paper proposes two strategies to stabilize bicycle posture and trajectory control that realizes a straight-line tracking: one is a lateral velocity controller, and the other is a steering function controller. The validity of the proposed approaches is evaluated by simulations and experiments.