Bicycle Laboratorium

Bicycle Laboratorium

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Simon Sorgedrager Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Simon Sorgedgrager successfully defended his MSc thesis titled Riding a Bicycle Without Hands: How To Do It and the Bicycle Dynamics Behind It on April 25, 2025. Simon created variations of bicycle rider upper-body models for use in the study of controlling the non-linear Carvallo-Whipple bicycle model. In particular, he …

Anna Marbus Successfully Defends Her MSc Thesis

Anna Marbus successfully defended "Cyclist Conflict Behaviour in Shared Spaces" on April 17th, 2025. Anna developed an experiment with pairs of cyclists that forced them to interact with each other in an uncontrolled shared space when crossing paths. She measured the trajectories of the cyclist with an accurate GNSS measurement …

Gabriele Dell'Orto Successfully Defends His PhD Thesis

Dr. Gabriele Dell'Orto just following the awarding of the doctorate on Februrary 25, 2025. Left to right: Madam Beadle, Riender Happee, Jason K. Moore, Frans van der Helm, Pier de Jong, Gabriele Dell'Orto, Malte Rothhämel, Teddy Vijfvinkel, Igo Bessilink (top row), Giampiero Mastinu (bottom row), Bart van Arem Bike Lab …

PhD Graduation Announcement: Gabriele Dell'Orto

Bike Lab PhD candidate, Gabriele Dell'Orto, has completed his PhD dissertation titled "Bicycle tyre lateral characteristics and their effect on bicycle dynamics", found here: https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:dc549b99-0b00-4f24-995b-94a44cbf5caa Gabriele will publicly defend his PhD on Tuesday, February 25th. The layperson's talk is at 9:30 CET and …

BMD 2023 Proceedings Book Published

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the BMD 2023 conference in Delft and we are very pleased to announce that the proceedings book is now officially published. The proceedings is a 464 page volume containing 60 extended abstracts from all the presentations and 28 peer reviewed full papers. BMD …

Sietse Soethout Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Sietse Soethout successfully defended "A dynamic utility cycling model for energy and time expenditure calculation of a population of cyclists" on September 23, 2024. Sietse developed a physics-based energetic simulation model of a bicyclist that is capable of traversing urban terrain. The model considers the longitudinal vehicle dynamics, cyclist physiology …

Anna Marbus's Research Featured on the TU Delft Website

TU Delft communications featured Anna Marbus's research on cyclist conflict behavior this week on the TU Delft website. Anna is supervised by Christoph Schmidt and they are working on data driven traffic simulation models for cyclists. Anna will begin her experiments very soon, so contact us if you'd like to …

Kenneth Pasma Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Kenneth Pasma successfully defended "Model Matching Control Applied to Bicycles" on August 28, 2024. Kenneth developed a controller for our steer-by-wire bicycle's steering motor that enables matching the bicycle's dynamics to that of a reference bicycle. A model matching controller strives to make the input-output dynamics of the controlled vehicle …

Nijmegen Velorama Bicycle Tour

The bicycle lab completed their second annual bicycle tour! Neville, Bart, Christoph, Nora, Sietse, Jason, and Yumi bicycled from Delft-Rotterdam to Nijmegen and back over three days and covered about 250 km. We had a few interesting bicycles in the fleet. Neville and Sietse road the stoker-steering tandem, Bart rode …

Kirsten Dijkman Successfully Defends Her MSc Thesis

Kirsten Dijkman successfully defended "Impact of bicycle tire parameters on the total rolling losses" on January 11, 2024. Kirsten executed three experiments to investigate all aspects of forward motion energy losses due to the bicycle-rider system rolling on different road surfaces. She first characterized the tire contact patch for a …

Marten Haitjema Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Marten Haitjema successfully defended "Estimating fall probability in cycling" on December 14, 2023. Marten identified the linear dynamics of a robotically balance assisted bicycle showing that the lean rate feedback controller can stabilize the bicycle at very low speeds and that the time constant of the instability is significantly reduced …

Timo Stienstra Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Timo Stienstra successfully defended "BRiM: A Modular Bicycle-Rider Modeling Framework". Timo developed a multibody dynamics modeling tool that makes it much easier to build and change bicycle-rider models. It nicely allows you to modularly construct these models from components yet still have a minimal coordinate formulation of the dynamics that …

Jan van der Schot Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Jan van der Schot successfully defended "The Relationship between Equivalent Fall Height and Ground Reaction Force in Freestyle Ski Jumping". Jan measured both the trajectories of ski jump flight and the shape of the landing surface with high accuracy differential GPS for over 100 jumps. Using these measures he calculated …

Floris van Willigen Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Floris van Willigen successfully defended "Evaluation of the handling of a variable dynamics tilting tricycle". Floris used several measures of single track vehicle handling to assess multiple bicycles and leaning tricycles through hundreds of slalom and low speed line tracking tasks. After showing that his handling quality metric was able …

First Lab Bicycle Tour!

Several members of the Bicycle Laboratorium went on our first bicycle tour, which we hope to make an annual tradition! We bicycled from Delft to the Wortel-Kolonie in Belgium. Belgium hosts free camping spots "bivakzone" for through hikers and bikers around the country and we stayed at the one located …

Julie van Vlerken Successfully Defends Her MSc Thesis

Julie van Vlerken successfully defended "The influence of posture and stature on bicycle handling qualities". Julie added rider forward lean and arm inertial effects to the Carvallo-Whipple bicycle model, the later of which is known to remove a bicycle's self-stabilization property. She then calculated a task independent handling quality metric …

Six Abstracts Accepted to BMD 2023

All six of the Bicycle Lab's submissions to the 2023 Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics conference were accepted. We have had a very productive past year and are excited to show off some of the research. You can read the abstracts and the scientific committee's reviews on Orvium. MSc student Timo …

Balance Assist Bicycle Featured on Radio 1

NPO Radio 1 interviewed Frans van der Helm about our balance assisting bicycle. Find the recording here: https://www.nporadio1.nl/fragmenten/langs-de-lijn-en-omstreken/ecde8e18-8537-44e6-a5f4-e7632386a04e/2023-03-30-tu-delft-maakt-fiets-waarmee-je-niet-kan-vallen

Jens Keijser Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Jens Keijser successfully defended "Investigating the Theoretical Feasibility of Longitudinal Motion Control in Indoor Cycling Trainers". He developed a simulation of an indoor cycling trainer that itself simulated longitudinal motion with only cadence and crank torque as inputs. He verified that the simulator had similar motion behavior as the cyclist …

Jan Heinen Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Jan Heinen successfully defended "Optimal Skateboard Geometry for Maximizing Ollie Height". He developed a skateboard and skateboarder model capable of performing an ollie. He used trajectory optimization to maximize the height of the skateboard ollie under physiological and dynamic constraints. Then he used his solver to optimize the skateboard's geometry …

Dorus de Boer Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Dorus de Boer successfully defended "Modeling a Professional Road Cycling Race To Determine the Fastest Wheel-Tire Combination". He developed a simulation based model that can assess past road races and test whether different wheels and tires would have improved the overall race time. This information can be used to inform …

Simonas Draukšas Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Simonas Draukšas successfully defended "Using Model Predictive Control on a Steer-by-Wire Bicycle for Performance Assistance". Simonas developed a real-time MPC controller to assist a bicyclist in making lane change maneuvers on a treadmill in a semi virtual environment. His goal was to determine if adding MPC control from the steer …

Daniël Landré Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Daniël Landré successfully defended "Predicting cycling risk at intersections with natural cycling data for speed-controlled e-bikes". He determined the sizes required for geo-fence speed control of e-bikes when you turn off the assistance motor power. The sizes can be large for urban areas, requiring urban cores to mostly covered, but …

Ajaypal Singh Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Ajaypal Singh successfully defended "Investigation of the chatter and squeal phenomenon in bicycle disc brakes". He developed methods to experimentally determine combinations of bicycle components that cause disc brake noise, developed an FEA model that can predict disc brake squeal frequencies, and introduced simple countermeasures that reduce unwanted squealing noises …

Bicycle Lab Featured on BBC CrowdScience Podcast

BBC World Service sent two reporters to interview us and try out some bicycles that challenge your ability to ride a bicycle with a goal to answer the question "How do you balance on a bicycle?" They asked very deep questions and the presentation of the ideas from the interviewed …

Francesca Andretta Successfully Defends Her MSc Thesis

Francesca Andretta successfully defended "Learning cycling styles using experimental trajectory data with Inverse Reinforcement Learning". She developed methods to characterize whether a bicyclist was behaving more cautiously or more aggressively in their riding style based on GPS positioning data. Francesca was co-supervised by Azita Dabiri in the Delft Center for …

Shannon van de Velde Successfully Defends Her MSc Thesis

Shannon van de Velde has successfully defeneded "Design of a setup for experimental research on stability of a bicycle-rider system subject to large perturbations" Everyone at the bicycle lab is very proud of Shannon and wishes her the best! Shannon will move to Belgium for a new engineering position.

Jelle Haasnoot Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Jelle Haasnoot successfully defended "Design and Validation of Steer, Roll, Yaw and Sway Motion of a Kinematics-Based Bicycle Simulator. Everyone at the bicycle lab is very proud of Jelle and wishes him the best! Jelle will move into a full time position at Tacx and will likely mentor some future …

CZI Grant Awarded to SymPy Computational Biomechanics Project

The TU Delft Bicycle Lab has been awarded approximately one third of a $350k grant to the SymPy project from the Chan-Zuckerberg Foundation as part of their "Essential Open Source Software for Science" program. SymPy is joining a host of exciting open source software projects in this program. This is …

Joris Kuiper Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Joris Kuiper successfully defended "Development of an Integrated Bicycle Accident Detection System: Introducing ALARM: Accident Localisation And Recognition Method". His system is designed for future Gazelle electric bikes. Joris has accepted a position at Gearbox to develop agricultural robots following graduation. Congrats to Joris!

Jan Groenhuis Successfully Defends His MSc Thesis

Jan Groenhuis successfully defended "Experimental data-tracking of the BMX SX gate start using biomechanical modeling and trajectory optimization". Everyone at the bicycle lab is very proud of Jan and will miss him! Jan is off to European bicycle tour as his first new venture.