Control-oriented steering dynamics analysis in sport motorcycles: modeling, identification and experiments

Recent technology advances in the field of semi-active steering dampers for motorcycles open the way to the design of innovative control strategies to improve two-wheeled vehicles stability. As such, it is of growing importance to devise simple and effective dynamical models of the bike steer dynamics to be employed for control design purposes. This paper proposes an analytical model of a two-wheeled vehicle tuned to capture the weave and wobble modes, which are the most representative to study steering related instabilities. The model is derived from first principles and its parameters tuned to fit a hypersport motorcycle based on a grey-box identification procedure. The model effectiveness is assessed on data collected both from a full-edged multi-body simulator and an instrumented vehicle.