Stabilization of an Unmanned Bicycle with Flywheel Balancer

In this paper, a new balancer configuration for stabilization of an unmanned bicycle and a new switching control algorithm are proposed. The balancer can be configured as a flywheel or a balancer by shifting the center of gravity of the balancer. This balancer configuration changes according to the lean angle and/or the balancer angle, which causes change of the dimension of the system. The balancer is configured as a flywheel, when disturbances to the system are large and switches to a balancer when we have to shift the position of the center of gravity for reasons. Stabilizing bicycle with the flywheel has better performance than the balancer but this configuration cannot be controlled to shift the lean angle to track the desired value, unlike the balancer. The balancing controller is derived based on an output-zeroing controller. The parameters of the balancing control are switched based on the configuration of the balancer. Numerical simulation results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.