Experimental gyroscopic stabilization of motorcycles: a 3rd order sliding mode approach

Novel Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are being increasingly designed also for two-wheeled vehicles, both to increase safety and to improve the vehicle usability. One of the most challenging problems is ensuring roll stability at low-speed or standstill, useful to face dangerous conditions, for instance those related to impending rider's sickness. In this work we develop an active gyroscopic controller to achieve stabilization and make the motorcycle sustain itself while at standstill. The parametric uncertainties that affect the system, the errors in the roll angle estimation, the unbalanced loads and the coupling between the roll dynamics and the rider's posture make the control problem non trivial: thus a 3rd order sliding mode controller is designed and experimentally tested. Simulations allow to understand the tuning principle of the controller, while experimental results on an instrumented motorcycle equipped with a gyroscopic actuator prove that the proposed approach allows to achieve the desired vertical stabilization.