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Performing safe and effective gear shifts on two-wheeled vehicles in an automatic way is a challenging task, mainly due to the complexity of the system dynamics and the safety-critical aspects of the application. This work offers one of the first contributions in this area, analyzing all the aspects related to this control problem. Specifically, this work provides two main results: an objective quality assessment of the gear-shifting performance and a new gear shift control strategy that optimizes the tradeoff between duration and comfort. The results obtained on an instrumented vehicle confirm the suitability of the proposed approach.

This paper addresses the design of a heart rate (HR) control system for a bicycle equipped with a continuously varying transmission. The control system helps the cyclist maintain a constant physical effort throughout the trip. A complete model of the entire system (bicycle, cyclist, and HR dynamics) is derived, identified, and validated using experimental data. The model is the basis for the development of two controllers. A proportional–integral controller and a second-order sliding mode (SOSM) controller. The two controllers are analyzed, concluding that the SOSM controller offers better robustness against unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. The SOSM controller is finally exhaustively tested on two subjects in real-world conditions. With the proposed systems, the riders are capable of keeping their HR within 10 bpm from the desired one.

By-wire technologies are extremely appealing, as they allow a fully adjustable modulation of the actuation system, together with better potential performance than their wired counterparts. In this work, a novel electro-mechanical layout for a full by-wire management of a motorcycle clutch system is presented, and the related control problem is addressed. Comparing the new system with a more traditional electro-hydraulic setup that was previously studied, it results easier to control and it provides a better riding feeling. Experimental results on an instrumented vehicle demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Launch control is an innovative active system which offers an appealing automatic feature for sport motorcycles. Due to the high power of the engine and to the complexity of the torque transfer dynamics driving a smooth and safe start from a standstill might be difficult for non-expert riders in some working conditions. As such, an active controller capable of safely managing the vehicle acceleration from a standing start might effectively support the rider as far as both safety and performance are concerned. To control such a maneuver, two possible actuators can be employed: the engine throttle and the clutch. This paper illustrates the analysis and the design of a clutch-based launch controller for sport motorcycles, demonstrating that it allows the accurate tracking of an acceleration set-point thanks to a dedicated clutch position controller. Experimental results are presented that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Vehicle velocity and tire-road friction conditions are crucial variables to determine the vehicle behaviour in all maneuvers; therefore, all active control systems must either be robust with respect to them, or adapt their parameters to their current value if they can we propose to employ be either measured or estimated. A direct measurement of the vehicle velocity in slipping conditions is in general complex and impractical, and the same holds true for tire-road friction conditions. In this paper, sliding mode observers are proposed to estimate vehicle acceleration, which can be used both as in input for existing algorithms for vehicle velocity estimation and for estimating the current road conditions. Experimental results support the validity of the proposed approach.

This paper addresses the identification and control of a motorcycle electro-hydraulic clutch, to be employed as main actuator for the design of future automatic gear shift controllers and launch controllers. These applications have very different requirements in terms of tracking performance, and designing an effective controller for both working conditions is a challenging task, mainly due to the significant parametric uncertainties affecting the system, and the limited precision and resolution of the on-board sensors. The paper discusses the identification of a control-oriented model of the clutch dynamics and the controller design, presenting experimental results which witness the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

IT systems have to provide to their users prescribed Quality of Service (QoS) levels, usually defined in terms of application performance, which must hold irrespectively of the significantly time-varying workload. To handle system overload issues, admission control is used as an overload protection mechanism which rejects requests under peak workload conditions in order to provide QoS guarantees to the running applications. For ensuring QoS levels at design time, the performance of such mechanisms should be a priori guaranteed. To this end, this paper proposes an appropriate controller, the closed-loop stability properties pf which are formally assessed.

This paper addresses the analysis of the gear shifting maneuver for motorcycles and it constitutes, to our best knowledge, the first contribute to study this aspect in two-wheeled vehicles. Specifically, a comparison between automatic and manual gear shifting is discussed, based on which some cost functions are proposed to quantitatively evaluate the maneuver quality from measured data. Based on such cost functions, we are able to automatically classify the performed maneuver and label it with a quality attribute matching that assigned by the rider.