Trackstanding

What is track standing?

Track standing is a method used by bicycle riders to balance their bike while only moving a minimal distance. The idea behind track standing is that if you keep the front steering wheel at a constant angle, you can move forwards and backwards slightly forward and backwards to stay upright. When you have the angled steering wheel, moving forwards or backwards creates torques, due to the turning motion. Imagine that you are on a bike and the steering wheel is angled 30 degrees to the right. Moving forwards will apply torque CCW, while moving backwards will apply torque CW.

For our control system for balance, the control variable was the steer angle rate. But here the steer angle will be held at a constant rate and the speed needs to be updated, so the acceleration becomes the control variable. The cost variables lean angle and lean angle rate still apply, however instead of steer angle we use velocity. We want to minimize velocity, because the basis of track standing is moving very little to stay upright. The equation of motion of the track standing bicycle used for the LQR becomes:

In our track standing development, we set the steer angle to be pi/3 radians. We also edited the goodness of controller equation, we added in a distance formula term to check that the bike did not move far from the initial position. When running different tests for trackstanding