Balance control and analysis of stationary riderless motorcycles

We present balancing control analysis of a stationary riderless motorcycle. We first present the motorcycle dynamics with an accurate steering mechanism model with consideration of lateral movement of the tire/ground contact point. A nonlinear balance controller is then designed. We estimate the domain of attraction (DOA) of motorcycle dynamics under which the stationary motorcycle can be stabilized by steering. For a typical motorcycle/bicycle configuration, we find that the DOA is relatively small and thus balancing control by only steering at stationary is challenging. The balance control and DOA estimation schemes are validated by experiments conducted on the Rutgers autonomous motorcycle. The attitudes of the motorcycle platform are obtained by a novel estimation scheme that fuses measurements from global positioning systems (GPS) and inertial measurement units (IMU). We also present the experiments of the GPS/IMU-based attitude estimation scheme in the paper.