Human control of the skateboard.

Abstract Human control of the skateboard is investigated by modeling the rider as a single, rigid body pinned to the board along the roll axis. Human input is taken to be a torque applied at the ankles. The equations of the nonholonomic rider-board system are presented and a simple tracking task is established. Its dynamics are augmented by those of the skateboard and rider to describe the complete system in the tracking mode. Several control schemes are discussed. Under certain conditions, simple proportional feedback control of rider tilt angle can stabilize roll motion of the vehicle, but in the most general case full state feedback is required. In the complete state feedback case, a performance index for the tracking task is defined and the minimizing feedback gains determined. Time simulations of the tracking task using the optimal feeback gains are shown. Experimental results are presented which tend to validate the theory.