Suggested Citation:
Metz, Trevor Z. and Jason Moore (2019)

Design of an Electric Bicycle Speed Controller

Speed control is not a prevalent feature found in electric bicycles. Many electric bicycles implement a pseudo speed controller that does not include feedback based on sensing speed. As with automobiles, speed control can be desirable for driver comfort and safety. Additionally, accurate speed control is also very helpful when validating dynamic models of single-track vehicles, which is our motivation. This paper describes a low cost feedback speed controller for an instrumented electric bicycle. To achieve this, we used grey box system identification to fit a second order linear model of the longitudinal dynamics of the bicycle to a measured step time response. The resulting fitted plant model was used to design a robust PID controller. We implemented the controller with a custom Arduino-based microcontroller. The resulting implementation was able to maintain the interquartile range of measured speeds at steady state within ±0.1m/s of a desired setpoint speed.