Development of Bicycle Carrier for Bicyclist Pre-Collision System Evaluation

According to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 743 pedal cyclists were killed and 48,000 were injured in motor vehicle crashes in 2013. As a novel active safety equipment to mitigate bicyclist crashes, bicyclist Pre-Collision Systems (PCSs) are being developed by many vehicle manufacturers. Therefore, developing equipment for evaluating bicyclist PCS is essential. This paper describes the development of a bicycle carrier for carrying the surrogate bicyclist in bicyclist PCS testing. An analysis on the United States national crash databases and videos from TASI 110 car naturalistic driving database was conducted to determine a set of most common crash scenarios, the motion speed and profile of bicycles. The bicycle carrier was designed to carry or pull the surrogate bicyclist for bicycle PCS evaluation. The carrier is a platform with a 4 wheel differential driving system. Each wheel is attached to an independent suspension system to protect motors, gears and reduce the vibrations. The height of carrier was minimized to 78mm for reducing the interference to PCS sensors. To ensure it can be run over by the test vehicle during bicyclist PCS testing without being damaged, the size of the carrier is designed as 160x160cm with a protection mechanism. A finite element analysis (FEA) was conducted to verify the strength of the carrier. Moreover, a carrier control system was developed, which includes ZigBee based communication, safety sensor, and, vibration monitoring. A series of motion testing with different speed and trajectory profiles were successfully conducted. The safety and effectiveness of the bicyclist carrier was tested on a test track in various test scenarios.