Speaker: Mont Hubbard, UC Davis,
Davis, CA, USA
Title: Human Bicycle Control: Future Research Directions
Abstract: Recent experiments involving human rider control in several bicycling
tasks allows identification of the control laws used as well as the vehicle
dynamics alone. Although the well-known Whipple model apparently adequately
describes the dynamic motion of a bicycle without a rider in the stable speed
range, our experiments show that a more complex model is required for rider mass
approaching that of the normal human (say > 70 kg). This is apparently because
the torques from the tire contact patch are comparable to the control torques
assuming single-point wheel contact.
We suggest that a reasonable and parsimonious description of the rider control
law involves physically sensible states; steer, roll, heading and tracking
error. Sequential loop closure is suggested as a method of determining the
feedback gains used by the rider to accomplish tasks of varying complexity; pure
balance at arbitrary heading, and balance with both heading tracking and line
tracking