Citation

Cheon DS, Nam KH. Int. J. Automot. Technol. 2017; 18(2): 327-333.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12239-017-0033-5

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to assist human force acting on electric bike without using costly torque sensors via a model-based impedance control technique. In general, electric bikes are classified into two categories, i.e., pedelec electric bikes and throttle electric bikes. We focus on the system called a pedelec electric bike. It assists human pedaling force using the pedaling information, e.g., pedaling force or speed. To obtain the human's pedaling information in real-time, it needs physical sensors such as a torque sensor and a velocity sensor. But, these sensors are expensive and weak against external loads. Also, since these sensors are fixed directly to the forced component in a bike system, there are the risks of damage. For these reasons, sensor-less control methods based on a disturbance observer have been studied so far. In this paper, we have proposed a pedaling torque sensor-less power assist method and have applied it to the experimental pedelec electric bike. A power assist control algorithm, designed by employing an impedance model, consists of a PI-type feedback controller, an inverse model-based feedforward controller, and a pedaling torque observer. Finally, we performed experiments and confirmed the effectiveness of a proposed power assist control method. © 2017, The Korean Society of Automotive Engineers; published by Springer-Verlag Keywords: Bicycles; Bicyclists; Bicycling

Language: en