Active motorcycle braking via direct data-driven load transfer scheduling

Braking is recognized to be one of the most critical and sensitive maneuvers by most motorbikers and race-engineers. Many recent studies have been devoted to model-based design of electronic control systems to enhance the driver’s safety. In this work, a linear parameter-varying approach for braking control is proposed, based on the observation that in motorcycles the load transfer strongly affects the vehicle dynamics. Since modeling a real-world system might be very time-consuming, a direct data-driven approach is employed to tune the controller parameters, without need of a mathematical description of the system. The strategy is implemented on a full-fledged multibody simulator, and results are compared to a standard model-based strategy.