Seminar at NeuRA: "Emerging researchers in impact injury biomechanics"

On 5th December 2013 I will be presenting at the postgraduate student and early career researchers seminar in Sydney organised by NeuRA.

My presentation will be titled:
Automatic emergency braking for motorcycles: potential benefits and current challenges

Link to the flier

International Motorcycle Safety Conference - Manuscript from ABRAM - II

At the International Motorcycle Safety Conference in Orlando I had the opportunity to present an evaluation of the MAEB (motorcycle autonomous emergency braking) titled:
Can experienced riders benefit from an autonomous emergency braking system?

Here is a copy of the original manuscript: full text (pdf)

Short notice about the BMD2013

In these days - from 10th to 13th November 2013 - the Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics conference (BMD2013) is taking place in Narashino, Japan.

The international committee of this conference is outstanding, including Cossalter, Pacejka, Savaresi, Schwab and Watanabe among others.

This is a shortlist of the presentations:

• The Motorcycle Chatter (Massaro et al.)
• Present and Future of Active and Semi-Active Systems for Electronic Stability Control of Tilting Vehicles (keynote, Savaresi)
• What is the Relation Between Bicycle Dynamics and Safety in the Real World? (Dozza)
• Measuring Tire Forces and Moments of Motorcycles (Kishi)
• Active Tilt Control of a Narrow Tilting Vehicle via Torque Vectoring (Corno et al.)
• Construction of Motorcycle Riding Simulator for Two-wheeled Vehicle with Stereoscopic Vision (Yoshida et al.)
• Dynamics and Control of a Steer-by-Wire Bycicle (Schwab et al.)

Website of the BMD2013

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.

MAEB at the imminent 2013 International Motorcycle Safety Conference

A study dealing with the autonomous emergency braking for motorcycles (MAEB) will be presented at the
International Motorcycle Safety Conference in Orlando, FL, USA (October 16-17, 2013), organized by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation.

The authors of the study are Giovanni Savino (1, 2), Marco Pierini (1), Matteo Rizzi (3), Richard Frampton (4), and Jason Thompson (2).

The authors will try to address the following question:

Can an expert rider benefit from an autonomous emergency braking system?

Affiliations 
(1) Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Italy
(2) Monash University Accident Research Centre, Australia
(3) Folksam, Sweden
(4) Loughborough Design School, Loughborough University, UK