Enhancing active safety of two-wheeled vehicles via electronic stability control

In four-wheeled vehicles, electronic stability control (ESC) was introduced in the recent past to improve passengers’ safety in critical driving conditions and it is now part of most commercial cars. For two-wheeled vehicles, the design of such a control system is an open problem, and it constitutes quite a challenging task due to the complexity of two-wheeled vehicles dynamics and to the strong interaction between the vehicle and the driver. This paper describes an innovative control architecture which allows us to enhance the active safety while guaranteeing a good driving feeling. The proposed solutions are validated on a multibody motorcycle simulator on challenging maneuvers such as kick-back and strong braking while cornering at high speed.