Towards Safer Rides: Measuring Motorcycle Dynamics with Smartphones

Motorcyclists are among the most vulnerable road users in road traffic. Often, the cause of accidents is a loss of control on rural roads which could be averted by making use of the physical potential in terms of larger lean angles. At the same time, in reality driven lean angles over a larger group of riders and a longer route are unknown which is mainly due to the special measuring technology required. The focus is therefore on the development of a low-cost measurement method for measuring the lean angles of motorcycles. Smartphones are usually characterized by integrated inertial sensors, which are suitable for the acquisition of motorcycle driving dynamics. Employing a smartphone app tailored to the requirements for collecting measurement data on the motorcycle, the data of the sensors are recorded. During the offline evaluation, the rotation angles between the smartphone and the motorcycle coordinate system are determined, the inertial measurement data are transformed and the roll angle is calculated. An essential part is the alignment of the developed measurement chain with a high-precision measurement system. This was carried out on different routes and thus the data quality was determined. As a feasibility study, a test person study with several participants was carried out, which confirmed the practical suitability of the measurement chain. Hence, the study outcomes are briefly shown and discussed. The successful validation on different routes, the practical suitability of the data acquisition and the accuracy of the measurement system encourage to roll out the smartphone app to a larger panel of test persons and thus to collect data on a larger driver collective.