Project Summary
The goal of the VIROLO++ project is to develop tools and methods suitable for the study of the riders’ behaviour and for the understanding of the way they interact with their vehicle when negotiating a bend. Particularly, the aim is to improve knowledge about this specific manoeuvre, because the loss of control in a bend is more than 50% of single vehicle accidents.
The project aims to reduce the mortality (and disabling injuries) due to loss of control in bends through the development of :
- Knowledge about how motorcyclist effectively take bends and the resulting trajectories. Experiments will objectively measure the motorcyclist behaviour and the rider-vehicle interaction;
- A cybernetic model of steering control that will represent as close as possible what is achieved by the rider and allow to make suggestion for research on active safety systems operating in bends (ie devices taking all or part of the vehicle control);
- Offline tools for the objective evaluation of bend taking practices that should be used for the initialtraining and retraining. The goal is to reconstruct “fine” trajectories from recorded data and to compare themto safe reference trajectories, taking into account the visibility in the bend but also criteria minimization of the fuel consumption;
- A curriculum on a low cost motorcycle simulator that can be used for training and retraining safe practices in taking a bend (see item 3);
- Online tools for the quantification of risk when approaching the bend and after, tools that can be used by novice riders during and after training;
- An improvement of high performance motorcycle simulators designed by Ifsttar thanks to the knowledge on bend negociation practices among a diverse population of motorcyclists.