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Published in IET Control Theory and Applications
Received on 12th February 2008
Revised on 29th May 2008
doi: 10.1049/iet-cta:20080052

ISSN 1751-8644

Roll angle estimation in two-wheeled vehicles

I. Boniolo1 S.M. Savaresi1 M. Tanelli1,2
1

Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza L. da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milano, Italy
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dellInformazione e Metodi Matematici, Universita` degli studi di Bergamo, Via Marconi 5,
24044 Dalmine (BG), Italy
E-mail: tanelli@elet.polimi.it

Abstract: An innovative method for estimating the roll angle in two-wheeled vehicles is proposed. The roll angle is
a crucial variable in the dynamics of two-wheeled vehicles, since it greatly affects the behaviour of the tire-road
contact forces. Hence, the capability of providing in real time a reliable measure of such quantity allows us to
evaluate the dynamic properties of the vehicle and its tyres, and represents the enabling technology for the
design of advanced braking, traction and stability control systems. The method proposed is based on a lowcost sensor conguration, suitable for industrial purposes. The validity of the proposed approach is assessed in
a multi-body motorbike simulator environment and also on an instrumented test vehicle.

1 Introduction and problem

statement
Nowadays, four-wheeled vehicles are equipped with many
different active control systems which enhance driver and
passengers safety, some of which such as the ABS (antilock braking system) have recently become a standard on
all cars (see e.g. [1, 2]).
In the eld of two-wheeled vehicles, instead,
electronic systems for the control of vehicle dynamics are
still in their infancy: only a few motorbikes are equipped
with ABS systems; traction control, drive-by-wire and
semi-active suspensions are mostly conned to advanced
R&D prototypes; electronic stability control systems are
still far from an industrial application and only preliminary
studies have been done on this topic (see e.g. the
EU-sponsored REGINS project SAFEBIKE http://
safebike.jku.at).
More specically, the ABS systems today available on the
market are expected to work at their best only when panic
brakes occur at in-plane conditions (zero roll angle).
However, it is well known that a two-wheeled vehicle is
characterised by large values of roll angle (Fig. 1), which
can reach the astonishing value of 508 558 using highperformance racing tyres. This angle is the inclination of
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the vehicle with respect to the vertical direction and it

represents the amount of inclination that the bike needs in
order to ensure the force balance on the curve. These large
roll angles obviously play a major role in the overall vehicle
dynamics and make the motorcycle dynamics very different
(and much more complicated to be modelled and
controlled) from the car dynamics.
Hence, to move a step further in active control systems
for two-wheeled vehicle dynamics, the enabling technology
comes from a system capable of estimating the roll angle
in a reliable way and in real time. Moreover, to suit
industrial cost constraints, such system should rely on a
low-cost sensor conguration.
Besides its usefulness in control system design, a reliable
on-line measure of the roll angle might be useful in the
racing context to assess the tyre performance with respect
to this fundamental variable. In fact (see e.g. [3 13]), the
roll angle has a major impact in determining the lateral
tyre-road contact forces.
At a rst glance, the problem of estimating the roll angle
of a motorbike may appear trivial, using a standard
inclinometer. However, since the stability of a motorcycle is
based on the equilibrium between gravitational and
centrifugal forces, it is easy to understand that a standard
body-xed inclinometer is useless.
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These approaches, however, can hardly be used on standard
production motorcycles: GPS systems are reliable only when
open-sky conditions are guaranteed, offers a comparatively
low precision and are better suited for off-line processing;
complete IMU systems are still too expensive for industrial
applications.

Figure 1 Roll angle of a two-wheeled vehicle

A more sound way of measuring the roll angle is the
numerical integration of the rotational speed along the roll
axis, measured with a gyrometer. However, numerical
integration is highly sensitive to DC measurement errors,
which induce a drift in the integrated signal (see Fig. 2,
where this simple approach is applied on a set of real
measurements). This method can be used only if the
integration procedure is used over short time windows, and
a robust re-initialisation procedure is available. In a
motorcycle, none of these two conditions hold, and this
simple and naive approach cannot be consistently used.
In practice, no production motorcycle today is equipped
with a system for the roll-angle estimation. Roll-estimation
systems are used only for prototyping purposes and in
racing applications. Two systems are typically used:

Global positioning systems (GPS or differential GPS),

which allow the measurement of the complete trajectory
and derive from this information the roll angle as a
by-product.
Inertial measurement units (IMU) characterised by three
accelerometers and three gyros, which reconstruct the
whole vehicle attitude by gyros integration and by
accelerometer low-frequency components.

In the open scientic literature, very little has been published

on this topic so far. In [14], an interesting approach for
estimating the whole vehicle trajectory is proposed; it employs
a vision system made by cameras complemented with micro
electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers.
Something more can be found in the recent patent literature.
For example, in [1518] some approaches are described, whose
common purpose is to devise robust estimation methods with
low-cost (and small size) equipment. All the above
approaches, nonetheless, differ from that proposed in this
work. Specically, [18] focuses on roll-over detection mainly
tailored to four-wheeled vehicles, whereas [1517] focus on
accelerometer-based estimation algorithms.
The proposed approach, instead, is based on angular speed
measurements provided by gyroscopes installed in a special
conguration, and on the longitudinal vehicle speed
measurement, provided by wheel encoders. The main
advantage of employing gyroscopes instead of accelerometers
is that the formers provide measurements which are not
affected by gravity.
The key idea proposed herein is that of splitting the input
signals into high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF)
components. Then, the HF part of the roll angle is
estimated by direct integration of the HF component of
the roll gyroscope, whereas two different approaches for the
estimation of the LF roll angle are proposed. The HF and
LF estimates are nally added to get the nal estimate of
the roll angle.

Figure 2 Real roll angle and roll angle estimated with a simple integration of the roll rotational speed (real measurements)
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As for the expected estimation performance, we seek for an
estimation algorithm capable of providing peak estimation
errors of +58, which is considered to be an acceptable
performance for industrial production, if the main goal of
the roll estimation system is to be included into a braking,
traction or stability control system.
The outline of the paper is as follows: in Section 2, the basic
notation, the simulation environment and the experimental
set-up is introduced, whereas Section 3 illustrates and
discusses the proposed approach and shows the results both
in simulation and in experimental data. In Section 4, an
alternative method for the estimation of the low-frequency
component of roll angle is proposed and discussed. The
paper ends with some concluding remarks and an outlook
on future work.

Figure 3 Directions of the rotational axes used for the

angular velocities
by (for the sake of conciseness, we indicate c1 cos(1) and
s1 sin(1))
2

2 Notation, simulation
environment and experimental
set-up

cq cc  sw sq sc
RRPY a 4 cq sc sw sq cc
cw sq

To improve the readability of the paper, we rst introduce the

notation and reference frames employed in this work for the
gyroscope measurements, the simulation environment used
to test the algorithms and the experimental set-up used for
nal validation.

2.1 Notation and reference frames

cw sc
cw cc
sw

3
sq cc sw cq sc
sq sc  sw cq cc 5 (2)
cw cq

Considering the motorcycle dynamics, to avoid singularity

problems in the rotation matrices within the admissible
ranges of variation for the roll and pitch angles (see e.g.
[19]), it is more appropriate to employ the rotation matrix
RPY, which is dened as
(3)

RRPY a RZ cRX wRY q

The four gyroscopes used by the estimation algorithms are

mounted along four axes, indicated as x, z, y0 and z0 .
Notice that the axes x, y, z constitute the main bodyreference frame xed to the vehicle chassis. The two other
axes y0 and z0 are obtained by rotating the body-reference
frame of 458 around x. The gyroscopes along x and z are
used by the main algorithm presented in this work (Section
3); the additional gyroscopes installed along y0 and z0 are
used for an advanced estimation algorithm (Section 4).
Finally, the absolute reference frame is indicated with xa ,
ya , za .

where RX (w), RY (q) and RZ (c) represent the elementary

rotations around the X axis of an angle w, around the Y axis
of an angle q and around the Z axis of an angle c, respectively.
Accordingly, the geometrical relationships between the
body-reference measurement axes and the absolute ones are
0

1
458
B
C
W RRPY aw RRPY aRRPY @ 0 Aw0
0

The roll, pitch and yaw angles will be indicated with the
symbols w, q and c, respectively (using a more compact
T
notation: a w q c ); vx , vy, vz are the corresponding
body-reference angular velocities.
In Fig. 3, all the angular velocities used in this work are
displayed (note that the absolute angular velocities are
indicated with the symbols Vxa , Vya , Vza). More specically,
the following vectors of angular velocities will be used
2

3
2
3
2
3
Vxa
vx
vx
w 4 vy 5; w0 4 vy0 5; W 4 Vya 5
vz
vz0
Vza

(1)

The roll-pitch-yaw (RPY) rotation matrix, which correlates

the absolute and body-xed angular velocities, is thus given
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T
w RRPY
aW
2

1 3T
0
1
458
458
6
B
C7
C
T B
w0 4RRPY aRRPY @ 0 A5 W RRPY
@ 0 Aw
0

(4)

According to the adopted RPY convention, the absolute

angular velocities can be expressed as functions of the
considered attitude angles in the form
2
3
3
cc w_  cw sc q_
Vxa
6
7
4 Vya 5 6 sc w_  cw cc q_ 7
4
5
Vza
c_ s q_
2

(5)

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Figure 4 Modular scheme of the motorcycle model

Figure 5 Reference frames of the wheel, hub, point of

contact (POC) and world of the simulator

2.2 Simulation environment

yaw angle. Specically, the roll angle w is computed as

For the development and analysis of roll-angle estimation

algorithms, the availability of a suitable motorcycle
simulator is mandatory, in order to analyse and test the
estimation algorithms before moving to in-vehicle tests. In
this work, the motorbike simulator presented in [13, 20,
21] has been used. The model is developed in Modelica,
within the Dymola environment (see e.g. [22 24]) and it
is characterised by 11 degrees of freedom (d.o.f.) (Fig. 4):
the chassis has the 6 d.o.f. of a oating body, 2 rotational
d.o.f. are introduced for the steer and for the front hub,
whereas 1 translational d.o.f. is introduced for the front
suspension; other 2 d.o.f. are introduced for the swinging
arm and of the rear hub. The suspensions are modelled as
spring-damper systems, with nonlinear characteristics ([11,
25]). The exogenous variables (inputs) of the model are the
torques applied to the steer and to the front and rear wheel
hubs. The tire-road forces are computed according to a road
model. The longitudinal and lateral forces models are based
on [26]. Further, the motorcycle model is complemented
with a virtual driver (see e.g. [4, 5, 20, 26, 27]), which
allows to follow a reference trajectory.



kyPOC , zwheel l
w arctan
kzwheel , zPOC l

(6)

The pitch angle q is computed using the wheel and hub

frames (note that these two reference frames are used since
only one of them the hub frame is affected by pitch
motion)



kxhub , zwheel l
q arctan
kxhub , xwheel l

(7)

Finally, the yaw angle c is computed as



kx
,y
l
c arctan wheel world
kxwheel , xworld l

(8)

where the world frame is the absolute reference frame.

2.3 Experimental set-up

In what follows, the performed simulations have been
carried out by providing as inputs to the simulator a desired
roll angle prole and a speed prole. The virtual driver is
able to perform the desired manoeuvre at the desired speed.

The proposed estimation algorithm has been tested on a real

vehicle (a MY05 Aprilia RSV1000 Factory), as shown in
Fig. 6.

The most important customisation of a simulator tailored

to roll angle estimation is the installation on the motorcycle
model of a set of virtual sensors, which mimic the available
measurements. The chosen simulation environment provides
a library of virtual sensors, which can be placed on
translational and rotational joints in order to measure linear
and angular quantities (i.e. accelerations, velocities and
angles).
Fig. 5 shows the wheel, the hub, the point of contact
(POC) and the world reference frames, which are involved
in the computation of the reference roll, the pitch and the
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Figure 6 Instrumented Aprilia RSV1000 Factory used for the

experimental tests (courtesy of Piaggio Group)
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In the test vehicle, the following set of sensors and datalogging systems have been used:
four one-axis gyroscopes, with a cut-off frequency of
10 Hz;

difcult to eliminate all the possible misalignment errors.

To partially overcome such problems, an on-line tuning of
the mean value of the gyroscopes has been implemented.
Each test was always started with a 10 s-long phase of
constant speed on a straight road, in order to calibrate the
gyroscopes.

a 100-step wheel encoder;

two optical distance sensors;
a real-time board for the acquisition and data logging of
the whole set of measurements.
Fig. 7 shows how to the actual roll angle from the optical
sensors is measured, namely (the meaning of z1 , z2 and L is
clearly indicated in Fig. 7)

w arctan

z  z 
1
2
L

(9)

This kind of non-contact distance sensors allows us to obtain

a very accurate measure of the roll angle, with a precision
suitable for our purposes (i.e. the measurement error is
on average less than 18).
As illustrated in Fig. 6, the gyroscopes were placed on a
gyro-box on top of the bike tank. The assembling and
mounting of the gyroscopes are rather critical, since it is

Figure 7 Schematic diagram of the roll-angle computation

from the optical sensors (left) and the sensors mounted
on the test vehicle (right)

Proposed estimation approach

The estimation approach proposed herein has the general

architecture shown in Fig. 8. As mentioned above, the
main idea is that of splitting the input (measured) signals
(the two angular speeds vx and vz, and the vehicle
longitudinal speed v) into high-frequency (index HF) and
low-frequency (index LF) components. Such signal
components are processed independently after having been
split by the frequency separation block and then at each
sampling instant the LF estimate w^ LF and the HF
estimate w^ HF are added to build the nal estimate w^ of the
roll angle.
The internal structure of the frequency separation block is
illustrated in Fig. 9. It is constituted by a standard rst-order
low-pass digital lter (with a pole in a and DC-gain equal to
1) and a summing junction which splits the signal into the
LF and HF components. The parameter a is the only
tuning knob. In principle, the value of a should be as
small as possible, in order to eliminate only the DC
component of the noise, which is the main cause of the
drift in the integrated signal. However, as the roll
gyroscope noise has a frequency spectrum which exhibits
non-zero components also in the neighbourhood of the
DC frequency, in order to avoid the integration of such
noise LF components, a trade-off in the choice of the
value of a must be managed. Experiments have shown that
a sensible range for such parameter is a [ [0.1, 0.4]Hz.
The nal value of a 0.15 Hz has been found via root
mean square error minimisation computed for all the
measured tests.
Notice that the LF estimation block receives as inputs
the LF components of the measured body-xed yaw rate

Figure 8 High-level architectural view of the proposed estimation algorithm

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integrated signal. The numerical integration hence can be
applied only to the HF part of the signal, namely

Figure 9 Internal structure of the frequency separator block

DT
DT
1a
v (t)
v (t)
1  z1 xHF
1  z1 1  az1 x
DT
1a
DT
1a

v (t)
n (t)
1  z1 1  az1 x
1  z1 1  az1 x

vz and the longitudinal speed v (the additional gyroscope

measurements vz0 and vy0 will be used only in the
alternative method presented in Section 4); instead, the
HF estimation block only uses the HF component of
the body-xed roll rate vx . In the rest of this section,
the HF and LF estimation algorithms will be presented
and discussed.

Using algorithm (9), the measurement noise is depurated of

the LF component, and the drift problem is removed. On
the other hand, this algorithm also removes the LF
component of the true roll rate v x : the estimated roll angle
w^ HF hence carries no information on the LF component of
the roll angle, which must be reconstructed following a
different path.

w^ HF (t)

3.1 HF estimation
Since the roll angle w is simply related to the body-xed roll
rate vx by the relationship w_ vx , in principle it can be
reconstructed by a simple numerical integration of the
measured vx . However, as already briey illustrated in
Section 1 (Fig. 2), the main problem is that vx is affected
by noise: vx v x nx , where v x is the true roll rate and
nx is the measurement noise. Hence, the numerical
integration procedure applied to vx provides the following
result (DT is the sampling interval)
DT
DT
DT
v (t)
v (t)
n (t)
1  z1 x
1  z1 x
1  z1 x
(10)
w (t) nw (t)

w(t)

The main problem is that the measurement noise nx contains

LF components (and, in particular, DC offsets). Even if the
LF components are small, they cause a quick drift in the

(11)

In Fig. 10, the results of a 5-min long experiment

are displayed. The estimated HF roll angle is compared
with the HF true angle (measured with the optical
sensors). Apparently, the HF estimation is very accurate
and the drift problem (see Fig. 2 for comparison) is
completely removed. The corresponding error-to-signalratio is about 0.05 (namely, the error variance is 5% of the
signal variance).

3.2 LF estimation
The problem of estimating the LF component of the roll
angle is much more tricky. In order to develop the
estimation algorithm, it is useful to analyse the main
forces acting on the vehicle, when negotiating a curve.
Such forces are concisely and pictorially represented in
Fig. 11.
Consider now the following set of assumptions:

Figure 10 HF-components: true roll angle (thin line) and estimated roll angle (bold line)
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Figure 12 Absolute and body-xed yaw rates

Figure 11 Force balance on a curve
the vehicle is in a quasi-stationary condition (i.e. it is not
subject to longitudinal acceleration, the roll angle is constant
and the curve radius is constant);

This relationship is simply expressed by the pictorial

representation of Fig. 12. The correction term for the
estimation of Vza from vz is given by cos(w): it is
negligible for small roll angles, but it must be accounted for
when the motorbike has large roll motions.

In this case, it is easy to see that a balance equation which

allows to compute the roll angle can be easily worked out,
namely

It is interesting to observe that this problem is complicated

by another small distortion, due to the effects of a non-null
tire cross-section on the roll angle. To this end, let us
assume that the tire cross-section has diameter equal to 2ct:
it can be shown (see [6, 28]) that the error say Dwc
induced on the estimation of the roll angle is given by the
following expression



vVza
w^ arctan
g




ct sin arctan v2 =gR
Dwc arcsin
h  ct

the gyroscopic effects are negligible;

the tire has null cross-section.

(12)

where Vza is the absolute yaw velocity, v is the forward

vehicle speed and g is the gravitational acceleration.
Unfortunately, the absolute yaw velocity Vza cannot be
directly measured. The measurable variable is the
body-xed yaw velocity vz , which is related with Vza by
the following expression (see Section 2.1 for the notation)




vz sq cc sw cq sc Vxa sq sc  sw cq cc Vya

(15)

where h is the height of the vehicle centre of gravity measured

along the vehicle symmetry plane, and R is the curvature
radius of the trajectory. This error is usually small, but it
can take values up to 28.
Another subtle but critical source of distortion as already
remarked in Section 2 is because of misalignments in the
installation of the sensors on the vehicle. This can be
strongly reduced in an industrial product, but on prototype
installations this is a key issue.

(13)

cw cq Vza

Under the above set of assumptions, (13) can be strongly

simplied. As a matter of fact Vxa Vya 0, since the
vehicle has no roll or pitch velocity [see also (4)]. Notice
that this condition is fullled rigourously if the vehicle is
negotiating a curve and it is in a steady-state condition;
however, it still holds even if approximately if the
vehicle is not at steady-state but we consider the LF
component of the signals. Moreover, under the assumption
of null (or small) pitch angle, another simplication can be
applied, namely cq cos (q)  1.

Hence, the overall estimation algorithm for the LF

component is summarised in the block scheme of Fig. 13.
Notice that the LF signals vzLF and vLF are rst fed into the
function (12), where Vza is replaced by vzLF. The output say

Equation (11) hence can be simplied as

vz  cw Vza
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(14)

Figure 13 Structure of the LF estimation algorithm

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Figure 14 Warping functions (continuous lines) estimated starting from virtual measurements on the simulator (left) and
from real measurements on the vehicle (right)
LF arcsin (tan(w
LF))
The dashed line is the ideal compensation curve w

w~ LF of this function is then fed into a warping function.

Notice that this warping function, if (14) is the only source of
distortion, would be simply w^ LF arcsin(tan(w~ LF )).
However, since many other distortion factors must be
accounted for, in practice it is easier to estimate the warping
function directly from measurements on the vehicle. For the
estimation of the warping function, several tests have been
performed once the nal gyroscopes installation was xed to
the test bike. These tests were constituted by steady-state
cornering conditions at xed vehicle speed and xed
curvature radii taken on a steering-pad-like track, which were
repeated for different roll-angle values. The estimated roll
angle was compared to the one measured with the optical
sensor to provide the data points in Fig. 14b. In view of
industrial applicability, note that the estimated compensation
curve would depend on the considered motorbike only for
discrepancies in the mounting phase on different
vehicles rather than for the specic bike geometry and
loading. So, once the installation process has been dened, a
single warping function for a whole production line can be used.
In Fig. 14, an example of estimation of the warping function
is displayed. This function is estimated using standard
nonlinear system identication tools (see e.g. [2830]).
Specically, parametric polynomial functions have been used.
Notice that the warping function estimated on the simulator
is almost perfectly overlapped with the ideal warping
function w^ LF arcsin(tan(w~ LF )), whereas, when using real
data, the estimated function slightly differs from the ideal
curve, due to non-null tyre cross-section and installation errors.

3.3 Overall estimation algorithm:

simulation and experimental results
According to the scheme of Fig. 8, the nal estimation of the roll
angle can be simply obtained by adding the two independently
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estimated HF and LF components: w^ w^ HF w^ LF . In

Fig. 15, the results obtained with the estimation algorithms
presented in this Section are illustrated, both in the simulation
environment and on the real vehicle. It is easy to see that in
simulation the real and estimated roll angles are almost
indistinguishable; however, also in the (much more
challenging) real experiment, the residual error is very small
(peak errors of less than 58, and ESR of about 6%). Notice
that the magnitude of the LF and HF components are similar;
this is a further indication that the choice of the frequency
split is correct.

4 Alternative method for

LF estimation
The algorithm presented in the previous section has shown to
provide accurate results, with a comparatively simple set of
sensors. The only signicant aw of the proposed method
is its sensitivity to road inclination, which affects the LF
component of the estimation algorithm.
More specically, assuming that the vehicle is negotiating
a road with a slope rx (measured along the longitudinal axis
of the vehicle) and a banking ry (measured along the
transversal axis of the vehicle) from (12) (14) it can be
seen that under the usual assumption of steady-state
conditions the true roll angle (calculated with respect to
the road surface) can be written as
!
vv z
 ry
w arctan
g cos (w ry ) cos (rx u)

(16)

Notice that [apart from the presence of the term w in the

right-hand side of (14)], the estimation of the roll angle is
distorted by the pitch angle and the road slope and
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Figure 15 Simulation and experimental results of the overall estimation algorithm

a Real and estimated roll angles (top) and estimation error (bottom) simulation experiment
b Real and estimated roll angles (top), estimation error (middle) and HF/LF components (bottom)

banking, if these angles are not measured and explicitly taken

into account. Whereas the pitch angle can be considered
negligible in LF (or near-steady-state) conditions, the
inuence of the road slope and banking cannot be
removed; when the road inclination is large, a signicant
distortion is introduced in the estimated roll angle.
In order to cope with this problem, an alternative method
for the estimation of the LF component of the roll angle is
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now proposed, discussed and compared with the method

presented in the previous section.
Consider now the extended set of four gyroscopes, as
introduced in Section 2; they measure the angular rates
along the axes x, z, y0 and z0 (see Fig. 3). By exploiting the
geometrical relationships between the measurement
reference frames, the four measured rotational velocities can
be written as functions of the absolute velocities and
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attitude angles as follows




vx cq cc  sw sq sc Vxa cq sc sw sq cc Vya  cw sq Vza
p h

2
sq cc sw cq sc  cw sc Vxa
vy0
2



i
sq sc  sw cq cc cw cc Vya cw cq sw Vza
p h

2
sq cc sw cq sc cw sc Vxa
vz0
2



i
sq cc  sw cq cc  cw cc Vya cw cq  sw Vza




vz sw cq sc sq cc Vxa sw cq cc sq sc Vya cw cq Vza
(17)

Recalling that the reference frame xyz is rotated to 458 with

respect to the frame xy0z0 , the angular velocities in these two
frames are linked as
p 

2
vy vz
2
p 

2
v y v z
vz0
2

vy0

(18)

By manipulating (5) and (17), the following expression can

be found

vy
q_ sw c_

vz sq w_ cw cq c_

(19)

Under the only assumption of steady-state conditions (notice

that no other assumptions on the vehicle attitude or road
inclination are made), (19) can be strongly simplied by
plugging in w_ q_ 0 (Vxa Vya 0), so obtaining

vyLF
1
tan(w^ LF )
vzLF
cosq

(20)

In (20), an error term due to the pitch angle q is present.

However, under the working assumption of steady-state
curve, the pitch angle is negligible, so that in what follows
we consider q  0.
Since vy is not an available measurement, using (18) the
relationship (20) can nally be rewritten as

w^ LF



8
2 vz0LF
>
>
 1 ; vzLF  0
< arctan p v
2 zLF 


>
2 v
>
: arctan p y0LF  1 ; vzLF , 0
2 vzLF

(21)

From (21), one could notice that, in principle, the roll-angle

estimation could be done using only two gyroscopes (in
addition to the gyroscopic measurement vx , used for the
HF component). The additional measurement is
mandatory in order to avoid singularity problems when
the roll angle is around 458. From (21), it can be observed
that the gyroscopic measurement vz is always used,
whereas vz0 is used on the right turns only, and vy0 on
the left turns only. The rationale behind this choice can
be better appreciated by the pictorial representation of
Fig. 16.
As already remarked, the main advantage of using this
alternative method is that it is not directly affected by
road inclination. This can be appreciated in Fig. 17,
where using the motorbike simulator the results of
an experiment made on a non-negligible 108 slope are
displayed. Clearly, the algorithm presented in the previous
section is strongly affected by the road inclination,
whereas the above method is almost insensitive to this
problem.
We conclude this section with a brief comparative discussion
of the two algorithms for the estimation of the LF
component of the roll angle. We call speed-based the
algorithm presented in Section 3, and gyro-based the
algorithm presented above.

Figure 16 Pictorial representation of the alternative LF estimation method

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Figure 17 Simulation experiment on a 108 slope

The true roll angle (with respect to the road surface) is compared with the roll angle estimated with the algorithm based on the vehicle
speed (Section 3), and with the algorithm based on additional gyros (Section 4)

The main evaluation and comparison parameters are the

following:
Equipment cost (number and cost of the sensors): From
this point of view, the speed-based algorithm is
signicantly better. As a matter of fact it requires two gyros
only, and a wheel speed measure which is always already
available on the motorbike. On the other hand, the gyrobased method does require four gyrometers.
Robustness to null roll angles: Also from this perspective,
the speed-based algorithm is the best. As a matter of fact it
can seamlessly estimate the whole range of angles, without
singularity problems. On the other hand, from (21) it is
apparent that the gyro-based algorithm works as long as
the vz velocity is non-null, namely when the roll angle
is non-null. When vz 0, the algorithm as is cannot
be used.
Sensitivity to road inclination: As already stressed, the
speed-based algorithm cannot reject the distortions because
of slopes and banking [see (16)], whereas the gyro-based
algorithm is almost insensitive to road inclination, thanks
to the fact that it is based on the ratio between two
rotational speeds and not on their absolute values [see (21)].
The above remarks clearly show that the features of the two
algorithms are somehow complementary. Roughly speaking,
the speed-based algorithm is preferable (for its robustness
and low-cost) when the estimation-error requirements are
not particularly tight. For more demanding applications,
the gyro-based algorithm must be used. In this case,
however, the best approach is to combine the two
algorithms in order to exploit their best features; as a
matter of fact the longitudinal speed measurement is always
available, and the speed-based algorithm uses a subset of
the gyroscopes employed by the gyro-based method.
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& The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2009

Hence, when the gyro-based algorithm is used, the speedbased algorithm can be implemented with no additional
sensor cost. In this case, the problem of mixing and
blending the two algorithms obviously arises; this problem
however is out of the scope of this paper, and it is an issue
currently under study.

5 Concluding remarks and

future work
In this work, an innovative method for estimating the roll
angle of a two-wheeled vehicle has been proposed. Such
algorithm allows us to evaluate the dynamic properties of
the vehicle and its tyres and it represents the enabling
step to move towards a new generation of active control
systems for motorcycles. The proposed estimation
algorithms have been shown to provide a reliable roll-angle
estimation based on a low-cost sensor conguration, which
may be suitable for large-scale production purposes. The
validity of the proposed approach has been assessed both
via a detailed multi-body simulation environment and on
an instrumented test vehicle.
The current research activity on this topic is focussed
on the development of a blending algorithm that exploits
the benets of both the proposed LF methods, whose
complementarities have been shown and discussed.

Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by MIUR project New

methods for Identication and Adaptive Control for Industrial
Systems. Thanks are due to Enrico Silani and Vittorio
Gariboldi for their help in the preliminary part of this work
and to Luca Fabbri and Lorenzo Nardo of Aprilia for the
constructive discussions and for their support in the
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experimental testing. Thanks are also due to Filippo Preziosi
of Ducati Corse, to Carlo Cantoni and Roberto Lavezzi of
Brembo, and to Mario Santucci and Onorino di Tanna of
Piaggio, for stimulating discussions on this topic.

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