Revised Development of a Hardware-in-the-Loop Test Bench for Validation of an Anti-lock Braking System on an E-Bike

This article presents the development of a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) test bench that can be used to validate an electric bicycle (e-bike) anti-lock braking system (ABS) in different test scenarios. The same e-bike can be used in a wide variety of loading conditions, such as with a child seat or panniers (mounted on the front or rear), and different types of tires. Therefore, validating the overall system—i.e., ABS and e-bike—over a wide range of parameters, such as the mass of the rider, load distribution, and tire characteristics, is challenging. The approach presented here involves interfacing a parameterizable virtual bicycle simulation model running on a real-time target machine with the physical ABS hardware under test. This article describes the derivation of an equation-based model that considers six degrees of freedom representing the in-plane longitudinal dynamics of an e-bike. The simulation model was experimentally validated against measurements made on an instrumented test bike. Tests carried out as part of this development show that the developed HiL test bench can be successfully interfaced with a commercially available ABS, enabling the overall behavior of the ABS and the e-bike to be tested and evaluated in a safe and reproducible way before testing begins on the track.