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

Research Project, 2018 – 2020

The goal of this project is to develop self-driving bikes that will be used for validating active safety functions and testing algorithms for manual and self-driving vehicles. The bikes are intended to be used in tests together with vehicles and will be designed to behave as realistically as possible with the ability to move dynamically and roll around curves. The bikes must be self-balancing and be able to carry a dummy to make them to more closely resemble a human cyclist. This is not something available with test bikes available on the market today. With these self-driving bikes, it will be possible to design repeatable experiments that go beyond the scope of what is currently possible with today´s tests. It is intended to set up these tests similarly to how drive tests are conducted today with just vehicles involved. In this way, vehicle systems for detecting and predicting bikes can be challenged in very realistic situations. The plan is to build a series of bikes of different types such as children´s bikes, female and male bikes of different sizes. In this way, it will be possible to investigate how the safety systems cover the types of bikes on the market. The intention is that the developed bikes will be made available at AstaZero after the project.