Balance and control of a rear-wheel steered speed-record recumbent bicycle

The goal of the Human Power Team from the TU Delft and the Free University of Amsterdam is to break the world speed record in unpaced cycling (Sam Whittingham, 133.28 km/h). The design of such a faired recumbent bicycle is a challenge. The Delft design, called VeloX (Human Power Team (2013)), is a fully-faired monocoque front-driven recumbent...

Bicycle Design: A different approach to improving on the world human powered speed records

The current International Human Powered Vehicle Association world records for faired bicycles stand at 133.284km/h for the 200m flying start speed record and 91.562 km for the hour record. Traditionally the recumbent bicycles that have been developed for breaking one of either of these records have been optimized around a specific, relatively...

Bicycle Rider Control: Observations, Modeling & Experiments

Bicycle designers traditionally develop bicycles based on experience and trial and error. Adopting modern engineering tools to model bicycle and rider dynamics and control is another method for developing bicycles. This method has the potential to evaluate the complete design space, and thereby develop well handling bicycles for specific user...

Rider motion identification during normal bicycling by means of principal component analysis

Recent observations of a bicyclist riding through town and on a treadmill show that the rider uses the upper body very little when performing normal maneuvers and that the bicyclist may, in fact, primarily use steering input for control. The observations also revealed that other motions such as lateral movement of the knees were used in low...

Statistics of bicycle rider motion

An overview of bicycle and rider kinematic motions from a series of experimental treadmill tests is presented. The full kinematics of bicycles and riders were measured with an active motion capture system. Motion across speeds are compared graphically with box and whiskers plots. Trends and ranges in amplitude are shown to characterize the...