A concurrent controllers integration strategy to enhance the riding experience in bicycle driveline emulators

Bike emulators aim at replicating the pedaling experience by coupling a stand-alone bike with a dynamical simulator. The increasing interest toward series electric bicycles changed the traditional layout of bike emulators, leading to the virtualization of the complete bicycle driveline. Following this trend, in this work, an electric machine connected to the pedals is indeed used to enhance the virtual bike driveline emulation. One of the challenges to be faced when dealing with this task is to faithfully reproduce the effect of the freewheel. We address this issue with an electric motor control strategy based on two concurrent controllers. An ad-hoc anti-windup strategy is designed in order to manage the windup phenomenon occurring with the proposed controllers integration. The experimental validation shows the effectiveness of the proposed solution.