Automatic Gear Shifting in Sport Motorcycles

Performing safe and effective gear shifts on two-wheeled vehicles in an automatic way is a challenging task, mainly due to the complexity of the system dynamics and the safety-critical aspects of the application. This work offers one of the first contributions in this area, analyzing all the aspects related to this control problem. Specifically, this work provides two main results: an objective quality assessment of the gear-shifting performance and a new gear shift control strategy that optimizes the tradeoff between duration and comfort. The results obtained on an instrumented vehicle confirm the suitability of the proposed approach.