Gear up for Safety:Development and Evaluation of an Assisted Bicycle

Abstract

Although cycling is a promising transport modality for the future, cyclists could not substantially benefit from the safety gain in the last decades. To improve cycling safety and convenience, as well as extending the user base, we proposed to develop a self-balancing, assisted, and connected bicycle that transfers several assistance functions from the vehicle to the cycling domain. In this work-in-progress we sketch our vision of this bicycle, discuss some challenges for its development, and present early results. We present a self-balancing function using reinforcement learning and current progress in the development of a virtual reality motion bicycle simulator. If the progress in the projects continues as expected, we will report results from studies with human users soon.