Active Human Surrogate Control of a Motorcycle: Stabilizing and De-Stabilizing

Two aspects of a motorcycle injury crash are studied in this paper. 1) What were the rider's actions which led to unsafe handling of the motorcycle? 2) What were the injury-producing mechanisms present during the crash? This inquiry illustrates methods and procedures which are useful for motorcycle safety design as well as reliability analysis. The ADAMS™ mechanical system simulation program is used to generate computer models of a motorcycle and rider under rider control to simulate a mild lane change maneuver. Manual control and vehicle response characteristics are evaluated for a cases involving a system disturbance such as an encounter with a road pothole during the turning phase in the lane change. For the case when the rider/cycle system becomes unstable resulting in a crash, the 3-dimensional joint strength model for the human surrogate rider model switches from an active, motorcycle control model (pre-crash phase) to a passive, rebound model (crash phase), derived from the Hybrid III crash dummy. A biomechanical stress review is then performed to study the injury potential resulting from the crash.