On road tests

You may have seen us around in Florence with our test vehicle, a noticeable Malaguti Spidermax 500 equipped with laser scanner and a number of other gadgets.
The aim of this activity is to ride in real traffic conditions and evaluate the capabilities of standard technology to monitor the occurrence of possible inevitable collision states in relevant situations such as a car following scenario.

Can we observe realistic emergency manoeuvres in a riding simulator?

Can we induce realistic emergency reactions in a motorcycle simulator?
In a new experiment conducted at the Driving Simulator facilities of the Monash University Accident Research Centre, 15 riders had to face an unexpected imminent collision scenario while simulating a relaxing ride in the countryside. The group of riders included commuters, recreational riders, and professional riders such as trainers and Police riders.

Where they able to react properly or did they panic? Or rather: was the motorcycole simulator developed for the ABRAM project able to induce realistic reactions?

The results of this experiment will be crucial to determine whether tests with a simple and reproducible simulator such as the ABRAM simulator can be used to learn more about typical riders' reactions when facing inevitable collision situations. Additional knowledge in this field is fundamental to inform the design of last resort safety systems such as MAEB. In particular, MAEB activation should be designed to deal with any situation: the system should not interfere with a collision avoidance attempted by the rider, nor exacerbate the risks of severe crash outcomes in case of a panic reaction of the rider.

ABRAM motorcycle riding simulator is getting ready for the tests

The motorcycle riding simulator built for ABRAM is getting ready for validation and testing.
First impressions were promising. Despite its simplicity, the motorcycle rig mounted on D Box motion base provides adequate feeling to the rider.

Test rig of the ABRAM motorcycle riding simulator

The motorcycle test rig for the riding simulation experiments is now ready for validation.

International Motorcycle Safety Conference 2013 - A review - I

Orlando, 16-17 October 2013. The Motorcycle Safety Foundation organized the first edition of the International Motorcycle Safety Conference in collaboration with IFZ.

One of the most interesting projects presented at IMSC is the 100 Motorcyclists Naturalistic Study (website) conducted by the MSF in collaboration with the Motorcycle Research Group at Virginia Tech (VTTI). This study recruited 100 riders and their motorcycles for a large scale data acquisition in naturalistic conditions (normal every-day, real life riding, real world environment, non-intrusive equipment). The investigation has analysed 46 out of 100 riders and has already collected 42,000 trips of over 400,000 miles during 35,000 days of riding (corresponding to approx. 95 years). The duration of the participation of each rider ranged between 5 to 16 months and the types of motorcycles involved in the study were cruisers, touring and sports bikes. The huge study collected a large number of signals for each motorcycle, including five video views, vehicle state (speed, accelerations and rotations), and rider's control actions (throttle and brakes). The videos allowed for the identification of a large number of additional variables, including weather,  time of the day, lighting conditions, clothing, and protective gear worn by the rider.
Among the first results presented at IMSC, it was stated that the majority of the participants tended to ride during the day (24% of the trips were at night, 54% during the day and the remaining proportion at twilight). It appears that the riders did not wear any protective armor in at least 50% of their trips and from observations 28% of the riders never used armor. Concerning the helmet use, in less than 10% of the trips analysed the riders did not wear any helmet. In  4 out of 10 riders potentially allowed not to wear the helmet due to state legislation actually did not wear an helmet at some point.
More about this study is included in the paper "An Exploratory Analysis of Motorcyclist Apparel Using Naturalistic Riding Data" by V. Williams, S. McLaughlin and S. Williams presented at IMSC 2013.

...to be continued.