Methods to Assess the Stability of a Bicycle Rider System

Abstract

The SOFIE (Intelligent Assisted Bicycles) project wishes to create performance and design guidelines for mechatronic appliances which improve the stability of electric bicycles, so-called intelligent stability assist devices (IAD). To achieve this goal, a stability hypothesis, an advanced rider/bicycle model and bicycle stability test bench, will be created. This paper describes the development of these components and its goal is to present the project design. The stability hypothesis is based on the concept that the Centre of Mass (CoM) of the bicycle/rider system stays within certain lateral margins from the heading of a bicycle. The rider/bicycle model is created in Adams for multi-body dynamic simulations. The bicycle stability test bench is designed to be interchangeable between bicycles. The model, the test bench and the stability hypothesis will be used to validate the effectiveness of the IAD's and assist in their design. NOMENCLATURE SOFIE Slimme Ondersteunde FIEts (Dutch). Intelligent assisted bicycles.

Integration of agility in a MBSE methodology for multidisciplinary systems design

“…Cooke et al explain how agile software methods have been implemented to support the study of a bicycle stability test bench. By adapting the Scrum method, they describe how to apply a new approach called Scrum-Milestone to a multidisciplinary project, and then demonstrate that it is possible to adapt Scrum to some complex multidisciplinary systems [11].…”