Modeling and Simulation of the Motorcycle's Lowside Fall

Abstract The deployment of active safety systems enhancing the motorcycle stability and supporting riders in defusing critical and dangerous driving situations is a topic of major concern in the two-wheel research community. In the design and development of safety control systems, setting up an adequate model of the controlled system is a key issue since it should be able to describe adequately the motion of the vehicle in critical situations such as precarious adherence, cornering brake and acceleration, or dangerous falls. In literature, these situations are typically investigated by means of black box approaches, namely by using multibody numerical simulators in which the equations governing the vehicle dynamics are unknown. In this paper, instead, the authors propose an analytical model as alternative to black box approach for the simulation of critical and complex motorcycle's dynamics leading to falls. The model has been presented in author's earlier works, it has a minimum degree of complexity, considers the rear wheel traction/braking and takes into account the interactions between longitudinal and lateral friction forces acting on the tyres. This analytical model has allowed to investigate the lowside phenomenon and the simulation results will be presented.