Automatic Stabilization of a Riderless Bicycle using the Active Disturbance Rejection Control Approach

This work proposes an ADRC (Active Disturbance Rejection Control) strategy by disturbance extended observers to stabilize a moving riderless bicycle with a variant forward speed. Although the bicycle has an unstable and non-linear dynamics when in its upright position, which can be modeled as a LPV (Linear-Parameter-Varying) system that depends on the forward speed, a simplified time-invariant and lumped-parameter model, with an nominal constant forward speed is used in the controller design. ADRC scheme groups discrepancies between the simplified model and the plant, with external disturbances into an equivalent additive unified disturbance signal at input, which is estimated via the observer and rejected through a linear control law. The effectiveness of this strategy is validated by a co-simulation between ADAMS and MATLAB, which exhibits a high performance and robustness in a virtual dynamic model of the bicycle, submitted to severe external disturbances and parameter variations.