Experimental Validation of Bicycle Handling Prediction

Summary

This project aims to validate this metric directly from experimental evidence in bicycling maneuvers and tasks. We have developed a variable stability instrumented bicycle and demonstrated preliminarily that that there may be correlations between our theoretical metric and the rider's subjective opinion of the bicycle's handling.

Theme	Bicycle Engineering	Current Researchers
Last Worked On	December 2019	Past Researchers	Scott Kresie, Trevor Metz
		Collaborators	Mont Hubbard, Ronald Hess

Image showing handling quality metrics for a variety of bicycles.

Description

We have proposed a theoretical lateral handling quality metric for any given bicycle design based on a corpus of experimental data in aircraft handling research [1]. This project aims to validate this metric directly from experimental evidence in bicycling maneuvers and tasks. We have developed a variable stability instrumented bicycle and demonstrated preliminarily that that there may be correlations between our theoretical metric and the rider's subjective opinion of the bicycle's handling [2]. Ongoing work includes, improvements to the experimental apparatus and protocol for a larger scale validation with arbitrary experimental subjects [3].

[1]	Hess, Ronald, Jason K. Moore, and Mont Hubbard. "Modeling the Manually Controlled Bicycle." IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans 42, no. 3 (May 2012): 545–57. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCA.2011.2164244.

[2]	Kresie, Scott W., Jason K. Moore, Mont Hubbard, and Ronald A. Hess. "Experimental Validation of Bicycle Handling Prediction," September 13, 2017. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5405233.v1.

[3]	Metz, Trevor. "Design of a PID Controller for Controlling The Speed of an Instrumented Ebike", Laboratorium of Marvelous Mechanical Motum Blog (December 15, 2018) https://mechmotum.github.io/blog/ebike-controller-design.html