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