Motorcycle Riding Simulator: How to Estimate Robustly the Rider´s Action

This paper deals with a motorcycle riding simulator and addresses two key issues: 1) reconstruction of the rider´s action, which is considered as the main input to the simulation system, and 2) design of an appropriate force feedback on the handlebar, emulating a tire-road contact. To answer the first challenge, a Walcott-Zak-based sliding-mode observer is designed for the rider torque estimation. The reconstructed torque is used as the main control of the virtual motorcycle dynamic model to actuate the simulator´s platform. The steering system is modeled as a haptic display that is subjected to a couple of action-reaction torque: rider and tire-road dynamics. In addition, torque feedback is implemented to compensate the lack of the real tire-road contact. The control approach is based on a robust tracking problem of a reference steering angle by using the H_∞ optimization technique.