Experimental results for stabilizing of a bicycle with a flywheel balancer

In this paper, an experimental validation of a new balancer configuration for stabilizing of an unmanned bicycle is presented. The balancer can be configured as a flywheel mode or a balancer mode by shifting the center of gravity of the balancer. This balancer configuration is changed according to the situation of the bicycle system, which corresponds to the change of the dimension of the system. The balancer is configured as a flywheel, when disturbances to the system are large, and it will switch to the balancer when the position of the center of the gravity should be shifted. Stabilizing bicycle with the flywheel has better performance than the balancer but it cannot control to shift the bicycle angle to track the desired value, unlike the balancer which can do this motion. The balancing controller is derived based on an output-zeroing controller. Numerical simulation and experimental results are shown to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.