18 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO.
1, JANUARY 2011
Design and Validation of a Gain-Scheduled Controller
for the Electronic Throttle Body in
Ride-by-Wire Racing Motorcycles
Matteo Corno, Mara Tanelli, Member, IEEE, Sergio M. Savaresi, Member, IEEE, and Luca Fabbri
Abstract—This paper presents the analysis, design and vali-
dation of a gain-scheduled controller for an electronic throttle
body (ETB) designed for ride-by-wire applications in racing
motorcycles. Specifically, the open-loop dynamics of the system
are studied in detail discussing the effects of friction based on
appropriate experiments. Further, a linear time invariant nominal
model of the system to be controlled is experimentally identified
via a frequency-domain black box approach, together with the un-
certainty bounds on the model parameters. Based on these results
a model-based gain-scheduled proportional-integral-differential
(PID) controller for throttle position tracking is proposed. The
closed-loop stability of the resulting linear parametrically varying
(LPV) system is proved by checking the feasibility of an appro-
priate linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem, and the state space
representation of the closed-loop LPV system is experimentally
validated. Finally, the performance of the controlled system is
compared to the intrinsic limit of the actuator and tested under
realistic use, namely both on a test-bench employing as set-point
the throttle position recorded during test-track experiments and
on an instrumented motorcycle.
Index Terms—Electronic throttle body (ETB), gain-scheduled
control, linear parameter varying (LPV) model validation, motor-
cycle dynamics.
I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
HE electronic throttle body (ETB) is a mechatronic actu-
T ator devoted to the regulation of the air inflow at the en-
gine intake manifold. According to the drive-by-wire paradigm,
an accurate control of the ETB dynamics enables a correct and
optimized management of the air mass flow rate, which can be
managed independently of the rider’s request. The availability
of a properly controlled ETB provides several advantages. First
Manuscript received May 08, 2009; revised November 26, 2009; accepted
July 14, 2010. Manuscript received in final form August 08, 2010. Date of pub-
lication September 07, 2010; date of current version December 22, 2010. Rec-
ommended by Associate Editor C. Novara. This work was supported in part by
MIUR Project “New methods for Identification and Adaptive Control for Indus-
trial Systems” and by Piaggio & C. S.p.A., Aprilia Brand.
M. Corno is with the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC),
Delft University of Technology, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands (e-mail:
m.corno@tudelft.nl).
M. Tanelli and S.M. Savaresi are with the Dipartimento di Elettronica e In-
formazione, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy (e-mail: tanelli@elet.
polimi.it; savaresi@elet.polimi.it).
L. Fabbri is with Piaggio & C. S.p.A., Aprilia Brand, 30033 Noale, Venice,
Italy.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCST.2010.2066565
1063-6536/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE
of all, it can be employed to achieve a regularization of the dy-
namic relationship between the gas command and the driving
torque transmitted to the ground during acceleration maneuvers,
thereby offering a smoother vehicle dynamic behavior which
can significantly enhance the vehicle handling and driveability.
Further, the ETB is also employed as an engine protection mech-
anism. It ensures that the engine operates within a controlled
range, for example limiting the engine speed and regulating the
idle speed.
From a more advanced vehicle dynamics control perspective,
moreover, the ETB offers a way to differently shape the air flow
rate behavior in the face of a given acceleration command, thus
providing a means to customize the vehicle dynamic response to
the drivers’ gas request. This feature also allows vehicle manu-
facturers to personalize the vehicle driving feeling by conferring
it either a performance-oriented or a comfort-oriented dynamic
behavior, which would be in principle dictated by its mechan-
ical layout, simply via a different tuning of the ETB electronic
control system.
Finally, of course, an effective ETB control system is a
mandatory building block for the design of traction control
system both for four- and two-wheeled vehicles, e.g., [1]–[3].
Note that, mechanically, a throttle is a simple system; it is
mainly comprised of one or more butterfly valves actuated by
an electrical motor through a reduction system. The throttle
dynamic behavior is rendered complex by packaging, cost, and
reliability constraints. These constraints often translate into
dominant friction and backlash behavior in the transmission,
making the control of the valve difficult. In the scientific
literature, several control strategies have been proposed for
throttle actuation in cars with the common aim of achieving
good tracking performance in all working conditions and in
the face of parametric uncertainties and avoiding overshoots,
which are the main source of discomfort for the driver (see,
e.g., [1], [4]–[9]).
Electronic throttle actuation in motorcycles is far less
common than in cars; consequently, little has been published
on this topic in the open scientific literature so far. In particular,
in [10] a solution for the ETB control of two-wheeled vehicles
is proposed employing a variable structure control strategy. It is
worth noting that the aforementioned manufacturing constraints
become even more strict when the ETB is being designed for
two-wheeled vehicles, especially for racing motorcycles. Mass
and volumes optimization becomes critical since racing motor-
cycles are very sensitive even to small changes in the center
of mass, see, e.g., [11]–[13]. Furthermore, racing applications
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER
Fig. 1. Prototype electronic throttle body used in this work.
are far more demanding from the performance standpoint than
marketed solutions.
Within this context, this work focuses on the controller de-
sign for a prototype ETB for a racing motorcycle (see Fig. 1).
In particular, the open-loop dynamics of the system are ana-
lyzed and the effects of friction are investigated based on ap-
propriate experiments. In this respect, dithering is proposed as
a simple way to alleviate the problem. Dithering reduces the
effect of friction, thus enabling the identification of a linear
model of the mechanism. Specifically, a linear time invariant
nominal model of the throttle dynamics is experimentally iden-
tified via a frequency-domain black box approach. Based on ex-
periments carried out in different operating conditions, namely
on a test-bench and on the instrumented motorbike, the un-
certainty bounds on the model parameters have also been es-
timated. Based on these results a model-based gain-scheduled
PID controller for throttle position tracking is proposed to opti-
mize the position tracking performance in response to all the dif-
ferent gas request profiles of interest. The closed-loop stability
of the resulting linear parametrically varying (LPV) system is
investigated and proven by checking the feasibility of an appro-
priate LMI problem, based on the state space representation of
the closed-loop system.
Further, to investigate the LPV modeling assumptions which
lead to a statement of equivalence between the input/output and
state space representation of the considered LPV system, a val-
idation step is carried out. Specifically, by comparing the sim-
ulated LPV closed-loop system with experimental data, the va-
lidity of the assumptions regarding the parameter-dependent co-
ordinate change employed in the state-space realization of the
closed-loop system is assessed. Finally, the gain-scheduled con-
troller performance are validated on a realistic input signal and
on the instrumented vehicle and compared with the intrinsic
limits of the actuator. It is believed that the proposed controller
matches the performances obtained by more complex control
architectures, see, e.g., [10]. Providing a final controller with a
simple and manageable structure is crucial in the considered ap-
plication, as the target electronic control unit (ECU) on which
it must be implemented offers a limited computing power.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
system and the experimental setup. The open-loop system
dynamics are studied in Section III, whereas the effects of
friction and the intrinsic performance limits are discussed in
Section IV. The system identification and the model-based
control law design are presented in Section V. The closed-loop
19
Fig. 2. Schematic representation of the electronic throttle architecture.
stability is proved, via LPV techniques, in Section VI and the
experimental validation of the LPV modeling assumption is
presented. Section VII introduces the experimental results,
comparing the closed-loop performance to the intrinsic ETB
limit and testing the system on an instrumented motorbike.
II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
The ETB under analysis, which is a prototype developed for
racing application, is depicted in Fig. 1. The system is comprised
of a dc motor, a planetary reduction gear and a linkage that
connects the shaft of the motor to the shaft of two valves. The
linkage is required for packaging reasons. In fact, in motorcycle
applications, mass and volumes optimization is critical: building
the body so that the motor and the valve were aligned would
have affected volumes distribution in a negative manner. The
system is equipped with a safety return spring which ensures
that the engine air is cut off in case of failure of the electronic
system. Two sensors are available for identification and control:
an angular potentiometer to measure the throttle plate position,
and a Hall effect current sensor measures the motor current.
Both sensors have anti-aliasing filters: the potentiometer is fil-
tered at 150 Hz, while the current sensor at 500 Hz.
Being the target ECU under development, a National Instru-
ments (NI) cRIO real-time controller was used to run experi-
ments and for control implementation, while a CAN bus inter-
face was employed for data logging. The NI cRIO device is pro-
grammable at two different levels; it has an FPGA with a 40
MHz clock and a micro controller running at 1 kHz. The motor
pulse width modulation (PWM) and the current loop (when
used) are implemented on the field-programmable gate array
(FPGA); thanks to this choice, it is possible to have a PWM
signal with a 20 kHz carrier. The 20 kHz frequency was chosen
as a trade off between the resolution of the control action and
the satisfaction of the switching hypothesis for the circuit. The
resolution of the PWM is given by the count of FPGA ticks in a
period of the PWM carrier; thus, the faster the carrier frequency,
the lower the final PWM resolution. A carrier frequency of 20
kHz yields a resolution of 2000 levels. Trying to increase the res-
olution any further would cause audible vibrations in the motor.
The FPGA also takes care of data sampling; signals are orig-
inally sampled at 20 kHz, and then downsampled to 1 kHz in
order to meet the CAN bus bitrate.
The micro controller is left for higher level control routines
and data processing, namely the actual position control loop and
20
Fig. 3. Behavior of the throttle position in open loop in quasi-static tests: (a) opening and (b) closing.
set point generation and filtering. It is anticipated that the target
ECU will have a sampling rate of 1 kHz and a 20 kHz PWM
carrier. The design of the final throttle position controller will
be carried out considering this final hardware specification, but
for analysis purposes the full potential of real-time controller
(i.e., up to 20 kHz of sampling frequency) can be employed.
Fig. 2 shows a block diagram representation of the throttle
control system. As can be seen, the electrical dynamics
have been decoupled from the mechanical ones, which are
described by the planetary gear, the return spring, a friction
term and the LTI throttle dynamics . The interconnection
between electrical and mechanical ETB components is due to
the electromotive force (E.M.F.). Finally, the system is com-
pleted by the position control loop, (s), which regulates
the throttle position to a desired set-point .
III. OPEN-LOOP SYSTEM ANALYSIS
This section is devoted to analyze the open-loop system be-
havior, characterized by the electrical dynamics of the dc motor
and the mechanical spring characteristic of the throttle body.
The electrical dynamics of the dc motor can be described by the
following equations:
where is the voltage applied to the motor, is the winding
current, and are the dc motor resistance and inductance
and is the electromotive force, which is proportional to the
motor rotational speed . The motor generates a torque which
is proportional to the current , whereas the control variable is
the applied voltage . System (1) shows that the relation be-
tween motor voltage and motor torque depends on , and ;
this dependency introduces two critical phenomena. First, the
strong dependency that the resistance has on the temperature
translates into uncertainties on the torque. Second, the electro-
motive force determines a coupling between the electrical and
mechanical dynamics. In mechatronics, these issues are typi-
cally solved by designing an inner current control loop to reject
these disturbances [14]. This solution yields better results when
the inner control loop is run at a higher sampling frequency than
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
the position one which controls the throttle movement. Unfortu-
nately, this solution could not be adopted because of the limita-
tions in the clock speed of the target ECU and due to the fact that
cost constraints prevented the use of additional current sensors.
However, in the experimental setup, the current loop option be-
comes feasible if implemented on the FPGA. As the inner loop
control better decouples the mechanical behavior and the elec-
trical behavior, it will be employed to estimate the mechanical
dynamics of the return spring, as it makes it easier to isolate and
understand the analyzed phenomena. As already mentioned, the
current dynamics will be left in open loop in the final controller.
It will be seen later that this contributes to increase the uncer-
tainties affecting the system dynamical model.
To analyze the nonlinear behavior of the throttle position in
open loop refer to Fig. 3(a) and (b), where the throttle position
is plotted as a function of the input current during opening and
closing quasi-static tests, in which the current was increased
along a very slow ramp. A clear asymmetry is visible between
the opening and closing, the former possessing a fully on/off
behavior, whereas the latter shows a sort of staircase descent to
the fully closed position. Note, moreover, that the position value
obtained for zero current varies significantly (from 0.2 to 0.38)
in the different tests and it does not correspond to a fully closed
throttle. This clearly confirms the criticalities of the system due
(1) to mechanical nonlinearities and friction effects.
Further, the spring characteristic has been identified. To this
aim, a very low bandwidth proportional-integral (PI) position
controller has been designed, so as to stabilize the closed-loop
system dynamics and make the controlled ETB able to follow
a very slow reference signal constituted by an ascending ramp
from 0 to 1 followed by a descending, symmetrical, one. Fig. 4
shows the position-to-current map of the throttle measured in
three different tests. By inspecting Fig. 4 it is apparent that the
system exhibits a nonlinear hysteretic behavior. Overall, the fol-
lowing three different phases can be outlined in the ascending
ramp:
• from 0.05 to 0.2 the spring stiffness is constant and approx-
imately ;
• from 0.2 to 0.9 the spring stiffness decreases to a value of
about ;
• from 0.9 to 1 the spring stiffness increases to .
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER
Fig. 4. Identification of the spring characteristic in three quasi-static tests.
Fig. 5. Hysteresis amplitude due to friction when dither of different amplitudes
and frequency 75 Hz is added to the current set-point.
In the descending phase, instead, the stiffness remains nearly
constant from 1 to 0.2. For lower positions the stiffness increases
and a negative torque is needed to take the throttle valve to the
fully closed position.
The fact that negative currents are needed to fully close the
valve is due to security reasons. As a matter of fact, in com-
mercial electronic throttles this feature is explicitly requested
by the law and it is usually realized by employing two different
springs. The non-zero position corresponding to zero current is
the so-called limp-home position, see, e.g., [1], [5], [6]. This fea-
ture allows the rider, in case of faults in the dc motor, to safely
move the vehicle off the road. In our case, as the considered
throttle was designed for racing motorcycles, no explicit speci-
fications on the exact value of the limp-home position were fol-
lowed, but nonetheless the spring was designed so that in case
of an electric fault the motorcycle engine is guaranteed not to
be instantaneously switched off.
IV. FRICTION EFFECTS AND PERFORMANCE LIMITS
As it emerged in the analysis performed in Section III, the
hysteretic spring behavior is due to significant friction effects,
mainly due to stiction phenomena. As friction does indeed
degradate the final position controller performance, one may
think of adding a dithering signal to the current input of the
dc motor. The chosen dithering signal is a sinusoidal signal,
whose frequency is tuned so as to be within the bandwidth of
the electrical dynamics of the dc motor and sufficiently high
to not interfere with the regulation of the throttle position.
21
Fig. 6. Open-loop valve opening (solid line) and closing (dashed line) when
the maximum and the minimum voltage is applied.
From the final application viewpoint, the tradeoff in designing
the dithering signal is given by—on one hand—the desire to
reduce the stiction effect (the final effect of the dither should
be that of keeping the throttle valve excited and just beyond the
movement point) and—on the other—to choose a dithering am-
plitude and frequency which do not cause an excessive power
consumption. The electric power consumption due to dithering,
in fact, can be computed as , where
is the dither amplitude and is the battery voltage (
12 V). Due to the system low pass dynamical behavior, the
dither amplitude needs to be increased proportionally to its
frequency; thus, the lowest possible frequency compatible with
the throttle position dynamics should be chosen to minimize
power consumption.
Fig. 5 shows the positive effects of dithering on the hysteresis
amplitude due to friction measured in the same quasi-static tests
described in Section III. The frequency of the dithering signal
has been set to 75 Hz, while different values of the dither ampli-
tude have been tested. As can be seen by inspecting Fig. 5,
dithering significantly reduces the hysteresis amplitude, which
decreases from the original value of approximately 0.5 to 0.05
A and the residual hysteresis can be considered negligible for
control design purposes. Moreover, it is apparent that increasing
the dither amplitude above 0.5 A does not add signifi-
cant improvements to stiction reduction, while it causes a larger
power consumption. Thus, a dithering signal of amplitude
0.5 A seems appropriate for the considered system. Note, fi-
nally, that around the limp-home position the dither has no effect
on the hysteresis. This is due to the mechanical spring layout,
which—as discussed above—is explicitly designed to be stiffer
around the limp-home position. It should be noted that the pre-
vious analysis was carried out with the help of the inner current
loop; in the final implementation the dither must be applied as
a sinusoidal variation of the PWM command.
Before addressing the position control design, it is interesting
to investigate the intrinsic limits of the considered electronic
throttle, in order to have a benchmark for the performance eval-
uation of the final closed-loop system. These limits were tested
both for the opening and closing dynamics by applying either
22 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
Fig. 7. Open-loop valve position (solid line) and normalized current (dashed line) for a maximum voltage opening (left) and closing (right) test.
Fig. 8. Estimated frequency responses from measured data ^ G j!
( ) in three
different experiments, the nominal parametric model G s
( ) and the associ-
ated uncertainty bounds.
the maximum or the minimum voltage to the dc motor. The re-
sults are shown in Fig. 6: as can be seen, the 0–1 opening occurs
in 87 ms, while the closing in 73 ms.
More details are shown in Fig. 7, where the position is plotted
along with the normalized current. Analyzing Fig. 7, the effects
of the electromotive force and the stiction can be noted. Fo-
cusing on the opening dynamics, in the first phase the throttle is
not moving and the current reaches its peak; once the initial fric-
tion is broken the throttle starts moving thus generating a elec-
tromotive force that the battery cannot overcome and therefore
a drop in the current is observed. The same behavior is mirrored
in the closing dynamics.
These actuator limits are appropriate for racing applications:
as a matter of fact, as it will be shown in Section VII, a profes-
sional driver requests a full-open/full-close throttle variation in
at most 100 ms.
V. IDENTIFICATION OF THE THROTTLE DYNAMICS AND
CONTROLLER DESIGN
For the design of the throttle position control loop, a classical
model-based indirect design approach has been used (see, e.g.,
[15]). The first step of this approach is to derive a model of
the controlled system. Classical black-box open loop model
identification requires to excite the system with an input signal
whose frequency components span the frequency range of
interest. This approach could not be applied to the system at
hand because of the two-state behavior of the open-loop throttle
shown in Fig. 3(a) and (b). Specifically, note that as soon as the
excitation signal reaches an amplitude large enough to break
the static friction, the throttle plate immediately gets to a fully
open (or closed) configuration.
This problem can be solved carrying out the identification in
closed loop. To this end, a low-bandwidth position controller has
been designed and a frequency-domain identification procedure
implemented. Specifically, the position controller was fed with
a reference signal constituted by a multi-frequency sinusoidal
signal (from 0.01 to 20 Hz) of amplitude 0.05 centered around
the nominal position .
Then, in order to estimate a non parametric model of the
frequency response of the overall system the inter-
mediate PWM signal and the output position have been em-
ployed. Namely, the frequency response estimate
has been computed according to the following expression [16]:
(2)
where denotes the cross spectrum of . Note that the
adopted identification procedure yields an unbiased frequency
response estimate also in the case of closed-loop identification
[16].
Fig. 8 shows the comparison of the estimated frequency re-
sponses obtained from three different experiments: two tests
performed on the test bench and one test performed on the in-
strumented bike. As can be seen, the identified models exhibit a
certain degree of variability, which will be thoroughly addressed
in the next section.
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER
Fig. 9. Controlled system responses to a 0.1 and a 0.6 position reference step
commands. The responses have been normalized to improve readability.
Fig. 10. Architecture of the gain-scheduled PID controller.
Finally, using the obtained non-parametric frequency re-
sponse estimate in the first test bench test (dashed-dotted line
in Fig. 8), a transfer function model for the system has
been obtained, by solving a nonlinear weighted least-squares
fitting problem. Namely, the parameter vector is the mini-
mizer of the following cost function:
(3)
where the weights have been tuned to privilege the fitting
within the frequency range [5, 15] Hz, are the sam-
ples of the frequency response estimate (i.e., that obtained in
the first test bench test). In this work the optimization problem
(3) has been solved via an iterative approach based on the
damped Gauss-Newton method [17]. The model order has been
determined trying to obtain a good tradeoff between model
complexity and accuracy. A better fitting could have been
obtained by increasing the model order, but this would lead
to the inevitable risk of over-fitting. It has been found more
useful to focus the optimization procedure on the frequency
range [5–15] Hz, which is the interval within which the desired
cutoff frequency of the closed-loop system is expected to be,
and therefore the frequency range where a more accurate model
is needed.
Note that in order to avoid numerical issues potentially asso-
ciated with frequency-domain polynomial fitting, the data have
been rescaled by normalizing the frequency range of interest.
23
The final expression of the identified frequency-response of
the nominal system has the form
(4)
Based on the parametric nominal model (4), a fixed-structure
two-degrees of freedom PID controller with anti-windup and
set-point weighting, [18], [19], has been implemented—in ve-
locity form—with the aim of achieving a cutoff frequency of 10
Hz and a phase margin of 70 , needed to minimize closed-loop
oscillations and overshoots, which have to be avoided as much
as possible as they are felt by the rider and limit his/her confi-
dence in the vehicle.
Note that, by analyzing a professional driver request (see,
e.g., Fig. 19), one notices that the fastest full-open/full-close ma-
neuver lasts approximately 100 ms. Thus, to mimic real inputs,
from here on over the employed set point signal is filtered with
a 20 Hz low-pass filter. The continuous time transfer function
of the regulator can be written as
(5)
where are the ideal PID tuning parameters, and
is the set-point weight of the derivative term. The model uncer-
tainties, previously mentioned and shown in Fig. 8, are also con-
firmed by the closed-loop validation of the controlled system.
Fig. 9 shows the normalized responses of the controlled system
to two different position step commands: a 0.10 and a 0.6 step.
Inspecting Fig. 9, it is apparent that the two responses are quali-
tatively different. Namely, the closed-loop response to the small
amplitude step exhibits an overshoot, whereas the large ampli-
tude step response is well damped.
As the final controller must achieve good performance and
absence of overshoots in the face of all possible reference sig-
nals compatible with a driver’s gas request, the controller pa-
rameters must be properly tuned to improve the closed-loop per-
formance in the case of small amplitude set-point variations.
To this aim, a scheduling strategy for the PID parameters as
functions of the requested position variation seems a promising
choice. Note that, in principle, when a single control system
must be designed in order to guarantee the satisfactory closed-
loop operation of a given plant in many different operating con-
ditions a genuine gain scheduling approach can be followed, see,
e.g., [12], [20], [21], [22]. This framework asks to find one or
more scheduling variables which completely parameterize the
operating space of interest and to define a parametric family of
linearized models for the plant associated with the set of oper-
ating points of interest. Finally, a parametric controller can be
designed to ensure the fulfillment of the desired control objec-
tives in each operating point (see, e.g., [23]–[28]).
In the present case, though, the linear parameter-varying
(LPV) identification step is nearly impossible to perform on the
ETB. In fact, the underlying assumption of LPV identification
techniques (see [29]–[32]) is that the identification procedure
can rely on one global identification experiment in which both
the control input and the scheduling variables are (persistently)
24 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011

Fig. 11. Adaptation laws of the integral time T and derivative constant T of the PID controller.

excited in a simultaneous way. This cannot be done on the

ETB where genuine open-loop identification is unfeasible.
Thus it has been decided to experimentally determine (by
trial-and-error) an adaptation rule of the PID controller param-
eters and then prove its stability a posteriori. This approach has
another significant advantage in the context of the considered
application, which relates to computational complexity. As a
matter of fact, besides the need to store the lookup tables with
the adaptation functions, the controller order and its structure
are unaltered, whereas genuine LPV controllers have in general
complex and high-order structures and are computationally
very intensive. Thus, the proposed solution is particularly
suitable for being implemented on motorcycle ECUs, which
offer a limited computing capability.
Hence, several experiments have been performed to estimate
the static maps used to schedule the integral time and the
derivative constant as static functions of the requested posi-
tion variation . The proportional gain and the set-point
weight have proved to be effective when proper constant
values are chosen. The final controller architecture is shown
in Fig. 10. Note that, as the chosen scheduling variable, i.e.,
the requested set-point variation , is anti-causal, it is in fact
computed based on the set-point derivative as follows:
Fig. 12. Step responses of the closed-loop system: fixed-structure PID con-
troller (dashed line) and gain-scheduled PID controller (solid line) for small
step responses (top plot) and big step responses (bottom plot).

(6) Fig. 12 assesses the effectiveness of the proposed gain-sched-

Equation (6) shows that is computed by considering (at
the current time instant ) the averaged value of the set-point
derivative—averaged over a time window —and prop-
agating it forward over by assuming that it remains
constant over the latter time interval. The values of and have
been experimentally tuned to 7 and 100 ms, respectively.
Fig. 11 shows the adaptation laws of the integral time and
derivative constant of the PID controller. As can be seen, the
adaptation law is simply a linear one, whereas the scheduling
of the integral time , which experiments have shown to be
the most influential parameter, is more elaborate. The shape of
the curve has been derived pointwise and then interpolated with
continuous functions.
uled PID controller, showing a comparison of the step responses
obtained with the fixed structure and the gain-scheduled PID
controller on a 0.1 and 0.7 reference step commands. As can
be seen, the gain-scheduled PID controller renders the response
better damped than the fixed structure one and—most impor-
tantly—the closed-loop performance is consistent for all set-
point amplitudes.
VI. STABILITY ANALYSIS AND LPV MODEL VALIDATION
In the previous section, a gain-scheduled PID controller for
the throttle position tracking has been proposed. Specifically,
the scheduling laws for the PID parameters have been experi-
mentally determined by optimizing the closed-loop system re-
sponse to different reference inputs. The proposed solution is
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER
Fig. 13. Time domain validation results of the LPV model at a frequency of 1.4 Hz (upper plot) and of 6.25 Hz (lower plot).
based on the scheduling of the integral time and the deriva-
tive time of the controller as static functions of the expected
variation of the reference position signal com-
puted via (6).
Once the scheduling law is implemented, the whole con-
trolled system can be seen as an LPV system. Furthermore, the
LPV framework also accounts for structured uncertainties in
the ETB dynamic model. As a matter of fact, the analysis of the
identified model obtained in different working conditions—see
Fig. 8—has highlighted that the system model is subject to a
certain amount of uncertainty which can be accounted for by
allowing a variability in the position of the first zero and in the
transfer constant of the nominal transfer function . interpolate the local models and this would in principle ask
Fig. 8 also shows the uncertainty boundaries when the position
of the lower frequency zero of is moved within the
interval Hz and the transfer constant varies in the
interval . As can be appreciated from Fig. 8,
the structured uncertainty describes the variability of the system
in the frequency range of interest. According to the adopted
black-box approach, the choice of the uncertainty-modeling
parameters has been driven by complexity considerations.
Specifically, we have looked for the smallest set of parameters
that could account for the whole variability shown by the
experimental data in the frequency range of interest. Three
time-varying parameters are therefore identified, so that the
resulting parameter vector can be defined as . and
Further, note that all the parameters vary with respect to time,
with bounds on the velocity of their time variation. The time
variability accounts for dynamic variations both of the system
uncertainties, which are expected to vary as functions of the
specific ETB, of the engine temperature, of the lubrication
conditions, and of the set-point, i.e., the gas request command.
Specifically, the time derivatives bounds on have been set
to . The bound on the time
derivative of the set-point variation has been determined by
analyzing several gas request profiles commanded by a profes-
sional rider on race circuits tests, while the velocity bounds on
the variation of the zero and of the transfer constant have been
25
chosen with dynamics compatible with thermal and lubrication
effects. The variability ranges of the parameters vector can be
described, in the parameter space, by a 3-D polytope.
By plugging the corresponding value of the parameters in
and in and closing the loop, a transfer func-
tion of the closed-loop system for each point in the parameter
space can be obtained. However, to resort to LPV techniques
for the closed-loop stability analysis, one needs to obtain a state
space representation of the closed-loop system. This step gives
rise to two different issues. Specifically, as we start from local
models of the closed-loop system obtained by evaluating the
parameter vector at fixed points of the polytope, one needs to
that all the state space realizations are in the same coordinate
basis, [33]. Second, in LPV systems—which are a special class
of time-varying systems—the usual notions of equivalence be-
tween input/output (I/O) and state space representations which
hold for LTI systems are not valid anymore, unless a dynamic
variation of the parameters is permitted (see [34], [35]).
In general, the interpolation problem can be dealt with by
resorting to balanced realizations [33], [36]. In the considered
case, however, as both the system and the controller structure
were known, an analytical state-space model both for the uncer-
tain ETB dynamics and for the gain-scheduled PID controller
has been obtained by performing a symbolic realization of both
. Based on such model, it is possible to
write the LPV closed-loop system as
(7)
where is the position set-point and is
the measured throttle position. As for the equivalence notion be-
tween I/O and state space realizations of LPV systems, it should
be pointed out that the standard LTI realization is only an ap-
proximation in the LPV case. It is well known that for LTI sys-
tems, if the state space model corresponds to the
transfer function then all the state
26
Fig. 14. Time domain validation results of the LPV model at a frequency of 8.5 Hz (upper plot) and of 12.5 Hz (lower plot).
space models defined by , where is
square and nonsingular, are equivalent to the original one, in the
sense that they give rise to the same input-output behavior. In the
LPV case, however, the above notion of equivalence class does
not hold anymore. This concept is better illustrated by consid-
ering the state space representation (7) and the parameter-de-
pendent coordinate change . If the coordinate
transformation is applied to system (7) one obtains
From the above relations, it can be seen that the obtained re-
alization (7) can be regarded as a good approximation of the
LPV system, i.e., the state-space model can be considered suf-
ficiently close to its I/O representation, only if the time varia-
tion of the underlying coordinate transformation, i.e., the term
is negligible, which corresponds to
accounting for a static parametric dependence only in the I/O-to-
state-space transformation. Unfortunately, a formal expression
for the approximation error as a function of the problem data is
very difficult to achieve, and this constitutes a challenging open
problem in the LPV modeling and identification context. How-
ever, it is possible to perform a validation step to experimen-
tally validate the LPV model (7). Note that this validation issue
is rarely addressed in the LPV modeling and control literature,
even though it constitutes a crucial part in assessing the sound-
ness of any LPV model and controller which is derived based
on local models.
Here, the validity of the state space closed-loop system (7)
has been checked by simulating the LPV system (7) and com-
paring the results with experiments carried out on the instru-
mented motorbike with the ETB controlled via the proposed
gain-scheduled PID controller. To account for the parametric
uncertainties in the ETB dynamics, in the simulations the two
uncertain parameters and were varied by applying sinusoidal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
perturbations with amplitude and frequency tuned according to
their respective magnitude and velocity bounds. As for the set
point variation , it was computed via the measured set-point
position according to (6) and used as input for the LPV model
simulation.
The results of this validation step are shown in Figs. 13 and
14, where the simulated and measured closed-loop throttle posi-
tions are compared, using a highly exciting sine sweep reference
signal spanning the frequency range from 0.5 to 15 Hz. Specif-
ically, to increase readability, Figs. 13 and 14 show four details
of the validation results, at four different frequencies within the
whole frequency span of the experiment.
(8) As can be seen in Figs. 13 and 14 the simulated response
shows very good agreement with the measured one, thereby
confirming the validity of the state-space LPV model (7) ob-
tained for the closed-loop system. Once the LPV state space
representation has been validated, it is possible to apply LPV
stability analysis techniques. Here reference is made to the fol-
lowing result [23], [24].
Theorem 6.1: The system (7) is stable if there is a matrix-
valued function satisfying
for all , where and is the bound
on the time derivative of the vector . The notation
indicates that every combination of and should be
included in the inequality.
The above problem is an infinite dimensional one. In partic-
ular, the infinite dimensionality comes from the fact that
is a function of and that the above conditions must hold for
all . Several techniques are available in the literature to
reduce the problem to a finite dimensional one. In this context
the parameter space gridding (see, e.g., [12]) has been preferred.
Namely, the following steps are performed:
1) grid the set ;
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER 27

2) pick a basis for so that ;

3) check the conditions of Theorem 6.1 for each point of the
grid.
For the case under study, the following basis has been em-
ployed:

(9)

and a 512 points grid has been chosen, constituted by the 8

points for each polytope coordinate. The problem is finally
translated into a system of 4608 LMIs, whose feasibility is
succesfully checked via YALMIP [37] and SeDuMi.
Remark 6.1: It should be noted that the gridding approach
does not formally guarantee stability unless certain conditions
on the gridding density are satisfied [23]. In principle, one
may think of avoiding the gridding procedure, as there exist
approaches in the LPV literature which formulate the stability
analysis problem as a feasibility LMI problem of finite dimen-
sion, see, e.g., [38]–[41]. To do this, however, the LPV system
Fig. 15. Original controller transfer function (solid line) and low frequency
must be written either as a linear fractional representation pole approximation (dashed line).
(LFR) or as an affine LPV system. Unfortunately an LFR
representation could not be derived for the system at hand
and an affine system structure could not be forced without preserve stability. Thus, to assess the validity of the obtained re-
adding too much conservativeness. Specifically, to write the sults in a discrete time setting, the approach presented in [42] is
system closed-loop dynamic matrix in such an affine form considered. Specifically, we focus on evaluating two important
via a set of time varying parameters, the parameter space has quantities , and , the former being the upper bound on
to be significantly enlarged and, most importantly, it would the sampling time that guarantees numerical convergence of the
loose its physical meaning and would not contain the set-point discretization algorithm and stability preservation, and the latter
variation . For the above reasons, the gridding approach was being the maximum local discretization error.
preferred. Note, however, that the gridding approach has the Considering the closed loop continuous time LPV system
advantage of being readily applicable in the case one should with dynamic matrix , one has
decide to model the uncertainty in a different way from that
considered herein. (10)
Remark 6.2: Numerically, the LMI feasibility problem is
very sensitive to the condition number of the involved matrices. where indicates an eigenvalue and is the spectral ab-
Of course, the realization problem to be solved influences scissa. Equation (10) shows that the chosen sampling period of
the condition number of the system matrices and thus the 1 ms ensures that the desired properties hold. Further, given a
LMI problem itself. In this respect, the most sound numerical maximum relative local discretization error which can be
approach is that of using a balanced realization, while avoiding tolerated, an upperbound on the required discretization time can
controllability and observability canonical forms which are be computed as
known to be ill-conditioned, [33], [36].
For the problem at hand, however, we took advantage of the
(11)
fact that the dependence of the controller parameters on the
scheduling parameters was known, so that a symbolic realiza-
where
tion could be performed. In this case, the final state space model,
which was then evaluated at the different points of the grid, did
not present critical numerical issues but for the presence of the
controller integrator. To alleviate this problem, the controller in-
tegrator has been approximated with a low frequency pole. As
shown in Fig. 15, this approximation does not alter the transfer where is the state space and is the control space. In (10) and
function of the controller around the cutoff frequency of 10 Hz. (11) the maximization and minimization over have been com-
Remark 6.3: The LPV validation and stability analyses have puted using the same grid employed in the stability analysis. The
been carried out in continuous time. As the final implementation state space has been estimated by simulating the continuous
of the control algorithm is done in discrete time, it is important time closed-loop system with different throttle position refer-
to verify that the stability properties are not lost in the discretiza- ences recorded during test tracks for all the parameter values
tion process. The discretization of the controller has been done in the above mentioned grid. The control space is defined by
according to the Euler’s forward method, which does not always the upper and lower limits of the dc motor voltage. Using the
28
Fig. 16. Comparison between the measured closed-loop system behavior (solid
line) and the intrinsic open-loop performance limits (dashed line): position (top)
and current (bottom).
above method, it is found that a maximum relative local error of
discretization of 4% is guaranteed with a sampling time smaller
that 1.1 ms. This upperbound is satisfied by the chosen
sampling frequency of 1 kHz.
VII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
Before turning to test the closed-loop system performance
against a real driver request signal, it is worth comparing the
achieved closed-loop performance of the throttle position con-
trol with the actuator intrinsic limits discussed in Section IV.
To this aim, let us refer to Fig. 16, which shows a comparison
between the measured closed-loop system behavior and the in-
trinsic open-loop performance limits both for the output position
and the requested dc motor current.
As can be seen, the closed-loop system provides perfor-
mances which are indeed quite close to the system limits, hence
exploiting the full actuator capability. Note, moreover, that
these tests have been performed with no dithering applied to
the real system; the measured current shown in Fig. 16 proves
that the measurement noise present in the real system when a
genuine dynamic excitation is applied (recall the the need for
dithering signal arose in face of quasi-static tests to estimate
the return spring characteristic) provides the requested degree
of dithering by itself.
Further, the system was tested on the instrumented motorbike
on a test track with a professional rider. The complete results on
the 60s-long lap measurements are shown in Fig. 17.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 19, NO. 1, JANUARY 2011
Fig. 17. Plot of the driver request measured in a test track lap (dotted line) and
the measured throttle position (solid line).
Fig. 18. Detail of the closed-loop behavior in response to intermediate varia-
tions of the throttle position: set-point (dotted line) and measured (solid line)
throttle position.
To better analyze the system performance in response to dif-
ferent types of driver’s gas modulations, Figs. 18(a) and (b) and
19 show different details of the complete lap, which correspond,
respectively to the solid, dotted, and dashed boxes in Fig. 17.
Specifically, Fig. 18(a) shows a detail of the time interval
s, where the rider requests variations of the throttle
position in the range 0.45–0.7 with opening and closing ramps.
Further, Fig. 18(b) shows a detail of the maneuver where a very
fine-grain modulation is performed by the rider around small
throttle openings 0.07–0.15, which are the most critical as they
continuously cross the position range where there is a significant
change in the return spring stiffness (see Fig. 4). As can be seen,
the system response is very accurate and it follows the driver’s
request with minimal overshoot in both situations.
It is also interesting to analyze Fig. 19, which shows the
system response to a very sharp full-close/full-open driver’s re-
quest. As can be seen, the fastest driver’s request imposes on
CORNO et al.: DESIGN AND VALIDATION OF A GAIN-SCHEDULED CONTROLLER
Fig. 19. Detail of the closed-loop behavior in response to intermediate varia-
tions of the throttle position: set-point (dashed line) and measured (solid line)
throttle position.
the system a full-open/full-close maneuver which lasts approx-
imately 100 ms, hence within the range of the throttle intrinsic
dynamic limits. The system response is accurate also in this
critical case, and the maximum delay in the response is of 10
ms, which is considered well beyond the limit of driver’s per-
ception. Finally, it is worth pointing out that, in the whole test,
the steady-state error is of the same order of magnitude as the
analog-to-digital (A/D) converter quantization, i.e., of approxi-
mately 0.0015.
VIII. CONCLUDING REMARKS
This paper presented a complete analysis of an electronic
throttle system for ride-by-wire application in racing motorcy-
cles. The electrical and mechanical dynamics of the system have
been studied and the effects of friction based on appropriate ex-
periments analyzed. Further, a model-based gain-scheduled po-
sition control system for throttle position tracking has been pro-
posed. The stability of the closed-loop system has been proved
via LPV techniques by solving an appropriate LMI feasibility
problem and the LPV modeling assumptions employed in de-
riving a state-space model of the closed-loop system have been
experimentally validated. Finally, the performances of the con-
trolled system have been shown to be very close to the intrinsic
limit of the actuator and the overall gain-scheduled controller
effectiveness has been assessed on an instrumented test vehicle.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank Prof. M. Lovera for the many
fruitful discussions and suggestions on LPV modeling and val-
idation issues. They would also like to thank the reviewers for
their comments and suggestions.
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Matteo Corno jointly received the Master of Science
in computer and electrical engineering from the Uni-
versity of Illinois, Chicago, and the “Laurea” Degree
cum laude and the Ph.D. degree cum laude with a
thesis on active stability control of two-wheeled ve-
hicles from the Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, in
2005 and 2009, respectively.
During his Ph.D., he had a six-month internship at
Alenia Spazio (now Thales Alenia Space). In 2008,
he had been a Visiting Scholar with the University
of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In 2009, After a joint
post-doc position at Politecnico di Milano and Johannes Kepler University,
Linz, he joined Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, as an
Assistant Professor with the Delft Center for System and Control. His current
research interests include dynamics and control of two and four wheeled
vehicles, nonlinear estimation techniques, and LPV control.
Mara Tanelli (M’05) was born in Lodi, Italy, in
1978. She received the Laurea degree in computer
science engineering and the Ph.D. degree in infor-
mation engineering with a thesis on active braking
control systems design for road vehicles from the
Politecnico di Milano, in 2003 and 2007, respec-
tively, and the Master of Science degree in computer
science from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in
2003.
She is currently an Assistant Professor of auto-
matic control with the Dipartimento di Elettronica
e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano. She is also currently with the Dipar-
timento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione e Metodi Matematici, Università
degli studi di Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy. Her main research interests focus
on control systems design for ground vehicles, estimation, and identification
for automotive systems, control systems design for agricultural tractors, and
identification and control for active energy management of data centers.
Dr. Tanelli was a recipient of the Dimitri N. Chorafas Ph.D. Thesis Award and
the Claudio Maffezzoni Ph.D. Thesis Award for her Ph.D. thesis. In 2008, she
and her coauthors received the Rudolf Kalman Best Paper Award for the best
paper published in 2007 in the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems Measurement
and Control.
Sergio M. Savaresi (M’00) was born in Manerbio,
Italy, on 1968. He received the M.Sc. degree in elec-
trical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in systems
and control engineering from the Politecnico di Mi-
lano, Milan, Italy, in 1992 and 1996, respectively, and
the M.Sc. degree in applied mathematics from the
Catholic University, Brescia, Italy, in 2000.
After the Ph.D., he was a Management Consultant
with McKinsey & Company, Milan, Italy. He was
a Visiting Researcher with Lund University, Lund,
Sweden; University of Twente, Ensende, The Nether-
lands; Canberra National University, Australia; Stanford University, Stanford,
CA; Minnesota University, Minneapolis; and Johannes Kepler University, Linz,
Austria. Since 2006, he has been a Full Professor in automatic control with the
Politecnico di Milano and is currently the Head of the “mOve” research team
(http://move.dei.polimi.it). He is an author of six patents, over 60 papers on In-
ternational Journals, and 150 papers on international conferences proceedings.
His main interests include the areas of vehicles control, automotive systems,
data analysis and system identification, nonlinear control theory, and control
applications.
Dr. Savaresi is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL
SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY, the European Journal of Control, and the IET Control
Theory and Applications. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE
Control Systems Society.
Luca Fabbri was born in Owo, Nigeria, in 1963. He
received the M.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering
from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 1990.
From 1990 to 1993, he was with Aprilia, working
as a mechanical designer in the racing unit. From
1993 to 2006, he was responsible for vehicle devel-
opment in the racing unit, where he led the design
and development of racing motorcycles for the
categories 125cc, 250cc, 500cc, and SuperBike.
Currently, he is the Innovation Manager of the
Motorcycle Engineering section for the brand Units
Aprilia e Derbi within the Piaggio Group.