Bicycle Laboratorium

Bicycle Laboratorium

E pur si muove

#engineering Articles

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

Postdoctoral Researcher Opening: Bicycle of the Future

Filled This job has been filled and is no longer open. Steer Assist Bicycle: an example bicycle technology developed at the TU Delft Bicycle lab with Gazelle. Job description The TU Delft Bicycle Lab is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for a 12 month full time contract. The researcher will develop …

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 …

Postdoctoral Researcher Opening: Bicycle of the Future

Filled This job has been filled and is no longer open. Steer Assist Bicycle: an example bicycle technology developed at the TU Delft Bicycle lab with Gazelle. Job description The TU Delft Bicycle Lab is seeking a postdoctoral researcher for a 12 month full time contract [1] with a starting …

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.