Part 1 – Cornering ABS
When Mick Doohan says ‘in our times, we only had our wrists and butts to save us’, there is an underlying bravado of taming those unruly monsters of motorcycles with absolutely no aids at all. How much ever we would want to do that, matching those skills would certainly be difficult. Today, though, there is a ‘cheat-code’ that is available for all of us to help us ride like the Doohans or the Sheenes from the golden days of racing. This cheat code is electronic riding aids.
The latest addition to the arsenal of electronic aids is the new six-axis inertial management unit. Six-axis IMUs are not something new. They have been used in ballistic missiles and space rockets before for their ability to gauge even the slightest changes in the direction of motion and quantify them precisely. Now that technology has made these units small enough to fit on your thumbnail, getting them into motorcycles has become fairly easy.
The six-axis IMU is an electronic circuit board (like a chip in your smartwatch). It has three gyroscopes along the three axes of space and a three-axis accelerometer. A gyroscope measures the rotational deviation from the designated zero position while the accelerometer measures acceleration in the direction of motion. In easier terms, have you seen those GoPro action camera motorcycle videos where the camera stays upright no matter how much the motorcycle leans? That is a gyroscopic mount for you, and that is what is used to measure the lean angle of the motorcycle.
So, imagine you are out for a weekend run into the mountains. You spiritedly lean into a corner on your supersport motorcycle. From here on, there can be two possibilities – either you will lean further while going into the corner or you will lift it. If you lean further, the contact patch of your tyres is going to reduce. Now if you brake, the brake force that can be exerted on that small contact patch will be a lot less than the brake force you can exert when upright. The gyroscope tells the IMU exactly what angle you are leaning. The accelerometer tells the IMU if you are leaning further or holding the lean. The computing wizardry then sends just the right amount of brake force to the wheels so that you stay on the bike all the time. That is cornering ABS for you.
As Keith Code has said, if you can reduce the pennies of focus that you spend on the little bits like braking and throttle, you can concentrate more on the road, the body position and your lines so that you can go faster. Cornering ABS, with help of the six-axis IMU, adjusts braking effort by sensing the exact position of your motorcycle and its further course of action allowing you to concentrate more on going faster.
Gallery
1/1
Double Tap to Zoom
