Self-driving bikes for more realistic development and testing of, in vehicle, systems for bike safety

Research Project, 2021 – 2024

Purpose and goal: The goal is to develop self-driving bicycles to perform tests for development and validation of vehicle safety systems. For active safety systems, the detection and prediction of the cyclist needs to be validated to ensure correct working safety system.
To validate passive safety systems, which protect the cyclist in case of an accident, one needs to perform crash tests with a bicycle carrying a dummy. The project will make it possible to perform these driving tests.

Expected results and effects: The project is expected to result in several prototypes of bikes including, portable equipment, to be put on “any” bike to make it self-driving, a crash-worthy self-driving bike intended for testing active safety systems. This will increase the possibilities to perform repetitive, human-like, validation tests of safety systems for bikes pushing the development of both active and passive safety systems for bikers. Theoretical results on the design and validation of the performance of the bike will be published in scientific papers.

Approach and implementation: The project is in principle a continuation and an extension of a previous project where the first self-driving bikes have been developed. The evaluation of these bicycles and input from participating companies form the requirements for the new project. Development will largely be done by students in project courses. After each course, tests and evaluation follow, which provides input to the next batch of students. The doctoral student in the project works primarily with the algorithms and the evaluation. The majority of the testing is performed by participating companies.