System identification of the Brompton bicycle

Abstract

The Brompton (a European folding design) bicycle was instrumented with a variety of sensors including acceleration, angular rate, speed, and steering sensors. A bicycle state estimator was designed to obtain additional information from this data including heading, turn rate, lean angle, steer rate, and positions of the wheels during a trajectory. The first part of the thesis describes the model setup for system identification including the Steer-to-Lean dynamics and Lean-to-Steer dynamics reduced models. CIFER software was used in the system identification process of these models. The second part describes the validation of the Empirical model by using the Rider Control model ([1]) and the Complete Rider/Vehicle model ([1]) to determine the feedback gains. The Theoretical model feedback gains were also determined by using the Rider Control model ([1]) and the Complete Rider/Vehicle model ([1]).