A Comparative Analysis and Design of Controllers for Autonomous Bicycles

In this paper, we develop and compare the performance of different controllers for balancing an autonomous bicycle. The evaluation is carried out both in simulation, using two different models, and experimentally, on a bicycle instrumented with only lightweight components, and leaving the bicycle structure practically unchanged. Two PID controllers, a Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), and a fuzzy controller are developed and evaluated in simulations where both noise and disturbances are induced in the models. The simulation shows that the LQR controller has the best performance in the simulation scenarios. Experimental results, on the other hand, show that the PID controllers provide better performance when balancing the instrumented bicycle.