Control of a Robotic Bicycle

This paper presents a simplified second-order dynamic model of the Arduino Engineering Kit robotics bicycle. We design and implement a closed loop control strategy, that minimizes the tracking error and rejects disturbances generated by uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics. The proposed controller allows the steering to rotate to the right or to the left to counteract its inclination similar to an inverted pendulum type mobile robot. In addition, performance indexes such as the standard deviation of the error and of the control effort and the ranges of initial angular values for which the robotic bicycle has convergence to the desired equilibrium point. Finally, we tested the proposed control strategy on a real robotic bicycle prototype.