As technology advances, motorized vehicles employ newer, more intelligent systems to improve drivers' safety and mobility. The evolution of these systems is supported by increasingly accurate models for driver behavior and vehicle dynamics. Despite the significant role of nonmotorized vehicles such as bicycles in traffic accidents, the evolution of in-vehicle intelligent systems has no counterpart for bicycles. Part of the reason is that, to date, models for bicyclist behavior are absent and models for bicycle dynamics are limited. This paper presents a platform for collecting field data from bicycles and shows how such data can support the development of intelligent systems by offering novel insights into bicycle dynamics and bicyclist behavior.
In 2009, 9108 vulnerable road users (VRUs; pedestrians and bicyclists) died in the EU and 4722 in the US. Active safety systems, that is intelligent systems able to predict and prevent crashes, may significantly help to reduce VRU fatalities and injuries; however, current active safety systems for VRUs are only found on high-end vehicles, only support the host vehicle driver, and do not make use of wireless communication. The scope of this study is to describe the set-up and realworld verification of a platform to enable active safety systems for VRU. This platform is carried by VRUs and may support multiple road users using wireless communication. A simple conceptual application, addressing pedestrian safety at crossings, was developed to test the platform. This application was not cooperative (i.e. did not support multiple road users with wireless communication). The results presented in this study suggest that such a platform can be employed (i) as a logger for naturalistic studies on VRUs, (ii) to better understand VRU behaviour and accident causation and (iii) as a basis for the development of novel active safety applications, running on portable devices, such as future generation smart phones, and possibly enabled by wireless communication.
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