Anti-lock braking was developed for vehicles that stay upright. Applying it to a motorcycle in a corner required the system to know something a car system never needs to consider.
Braking in a corner uses grip that is already committed
A tyre has a finite amount of grip, and cornering consumes part of it. Whatever remains is available for braking or acceleration.
The further a machine is leaned, the more of that budget is already spent, so the braking force that would be safe upright can exceed what is available mid-corner.
Conventional anti-lock systems intervene only once a wheel begins to lock, which in a leaned motorcycle may be after the machine has already started to slide.
An inertial sensor supplies the missing information
The enabling component is an inertial measurement unit, which senses acceleration along three axes and rotation about three axes.
From those measurements the control unit derives lean angle, pitch and yaw rate continuously, giving it a picture of the machine's attitude rather than only its wheel speeds.
The same sensor supports cornering traction control, wheelie control and cornering lights, which is why these features tend to appear together on a specification sheet.
The system limits pressure rather than reacting to lock
With lean angle known, the control unit caps the brake pressure it will allow before a slide begins, rather than correcting one afterwards.
As the rider stands the machine up, the ceiling rises progressively, and full braking force becomes available again once the machine is upright.
This changes the character of the intervention. The rider experiences a limit on how hard the lever can act rather than the pulsing associated with conventional intervention.
Load transfer is managed at the same time
Hard braking on a motorcycle transfers weight forward, unloading the rear wheel to the point where it can lift.
The pitch information from the sensor allows the system to detect this developing and reduce front pressure before the rear leaves the ground.
The same logic underpins rear wheel lift mitigation, which is a separate function using the same data and the same actuator.
What the system cannot do
The electronics can only manage the grip that exists. On a contaminated surface or a cold tyre the available grip is lower, and the system's ceiling is correspondingly lower.
It also cannot correct a machine already sliding beyond a modest margin, since a motorcycle recovering from a lost front is a matter of physics rather than software.
The realistic contribution is to remove the penalty for a braking input that would previously have been a mistake, which matters most in the situations a rider did not anticipate.