Autonomous motorcycles for agile maneuvers, part I: Dynamic modeling

Single-track vehicles, such as motorcycles, provide an agile mobile platform. Modeling and control of motorcycles for agile maneuvers, such as those by professional racing riders, are challenging due to motorcycle's unstable platform and complex tire/road interaction. As a first step attempting to understand how racing riders drive a motorcycle, this twopart paper presents a modeling and tracking control design of an autonomous motorcycle. In this first-part paper, we discuss a new dynamics model for the autonomous motorcycle. We consider the existence of lateral sliding velocity at each wheel contact point. Because of the importance of the tire/road interaction for vehicle stability and maneuverability, the dynamic modeling scheme also includes the motorcycle tire models. The new nonlinear dynamic models are used for control systems design in the companion paper.