Bicycle Rider Control

Abstract

Bicycle designers traditionally develop bicycles based on experience and trial and error. Adopting modern engineering tools to model bicycle and rider dynamics and control is another method for developing bicycles. This method has the potential to evaluate the complete design space, and thereby develop well handling bicycles for specific user groups in a much shorter time span. The recent benchmarking of the Whipple bicycle model for the balance and steer of a bicycle is an opening enabling the accurate modeling of a bicycle and making this engineering route very viable. However the route also requires a rider model in order to be successful, but at present, very little is known about the bicycle rider. The aim of this work is to get a step closer to being able to determine a-priori the handling qualities of bicycles and thereby enable the development of better, safer and out of the ordinary bicycles. To this end observation experiments have been performed to discover what control actions a rider performs on a bicycle and observed rider motions have then been implemented in a passive rider model. Furthermore the almost universally accepted requirements for bicycle self stability of spin angular momentum (gyroscopic effect) and trail have been shown experimentally to not be necessary.