Semi-active steering damper control for two-wheeled vehicles.

This chapter is devoted to the analysis and control of steering dynamics of powered two-wheelers (PTWs). Steering instabilities can be controlled via semi-active steering dampers. An analytical model is derived in the first section of the chapter in which the model is validated against both simulation and experimental data. The model reveals a parallelism between vertical and steering dynamics. Based on this, in the second section, the concept of rotational sky-hook (RSH) and rotational ground-hook (RGH) are adapted to the steering dynamics domain. Two control laws are proposed: the RGH, aimed at minimizing the absolute vibration of the steering axis, and the RSH, focused on the chassis oscillations. In the next section, the proposed strategies are validated on challenging manoeuvres performed in simulation. The last section presents experimental results obtained on an instrumented bike