Four-wheeled vehicles are being equipped with many different active control systems which enhance drivers and passengers comfort and safety. In the field of two-wheeled vehicles, instead, the development of electronic control systems is following with some delay. However, the importance of active control for traction and braking has been recently recognized also for motorcycles. The motivation for this is twofold: on the one hand, in the racing context, these systems are designed to enhance vehicle performance; on the other hand, in the production context, the same control systems are intended to enhance the safety of non-professional bikers. Within such an evolving context, this chapter addresses the control problems related to the longitudinal dynamics of two-wheeled vehicles, that is traction and braking. To do this, some preliminary material introducing the dynamics of such vehicles is provided. Furthermore, the technological issues arising from the actuation dynamics and the measured signals available on board are discussed, to better highlight the challenges of this specific control problem. Then, the traction and braking problems are formulated within a sliding-mode framework, and the performance of second-order sliding mode controllers are analyzed.

Chapter Contents:

• 3.1 Introduction
• 3.2 State of the art
• 3.2.1 Braking control
• 3.2.2 Traction control
• 3.3 Control-oriented modeling of the longitudinal dynamics of two-wheeled vehicles
• 3.3.1 The complete motorcycle traction dynamics
• 3.3.1.1 Actuator model
• 3.3.1.2 Transmission model
• 3.3.2 The complete motorcycle braking dynamics
• 3.3.2.1 Actuator model
• 3.4 The SOSM control approach
• 3.4.1 Preliminaries
• 3.5 Traction and braking control design
• 3.5.1 Traction controller design
• 3.5.2 Braking controller design
• 3.6 Analysis of the closed-loop performance
• 3.6.1 Traction control
• 3.6.2 Braking control
• 3.7 Concluding remarks
• References

Inspec keywords: braking; vehicle dynamics; traction; motorcycles; variable structure systems

Other keywords: vehicle dynamics; active control systems; second-order sliding mode controllers; two-wheeled vehicles; traction; braking; longitudinal dynamics; vehicle performance enhancement; actuation dynamics; motorcycles

Subjects: Transportation; Road-traffic system control; Multivariable control systems; Vehicle mechanics