An Observer for the Bicycle Pedaling Torque and Consumed Energy Estimation

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to develop an observer to estimate the pedaling torque and the consumed energy of a bicycler. The scheduled observer is an integrated system including a bicycle speed sensor, a slope sensor, and a microprocessor programmed with the observation law. If it is to be used on an electric powered bike, a motor output torque sensor is also required. The observation algorithm has a feed-forward and feed-back control block and a dynamics simulation block. The scenario of the observation is to simulate the control of the bicycle such that the simulated speed is same as the measured bicycle speed. The control effort is then transformed algebraically to obtain pedaling torque. Subsequently, the pedaling torque is multiplied with the pedaling speed to calculate the consumed energy of the bicycler. The simulation results show that the observation is suitable for application. Simulation results also show that the deviations of the observer dynamics model parameter values from the real values have small effect on the tracking error However, the bicycle speed measurement noise has significant effect on the result. Appropriate filter must be designed to solve this problem.