Advanced Rider Assistance Systems for motorcycles

This paper illustrates the Advanced Rider Assistance Systems (ARAS) developed at the University of Padova within the European Research project SAFERIDER (www.saferider-eu.org), which aims at studying the potential of ARAS to enhance rider safety, comfort and, hopefully, reduce fatalities. Three different ARAS functions have been designed, implemented and validated with a common architecture: the Curve Warning (CW), Frontal Collision Warning (FCW) and Intersection Support (IS). These systems are able to detect in advance potential dangerous situations and warn the rider by means of suitable Humane Machine Interface (HMI) elements. This paper explains in detail SAFERIDER ARAS concepts, illustrates their integration first into the riding simulator of the University of Padova and then into a real vehicle for final validation, and finally summarize pilot tests results. ARAS systems are organized into a three layers architecture: perception, decision and action. As shown in Figure 1, the perception layer includes sensors like GPS, Inertial Measurement Unit and Laser scanner. Sensors are connected to a dedicated CAN bus that gathers scenario information to the decision layer. The latter consists of the ARAS Control Module, which actually is a PC/104+, and manages ARAS software, i.e. a Scenario Reconstruction module. This module produces a consistent estimate of the vehicles state of motion and position, which are the input of FCW, CW and IS modules. These modules evaluate the risk of the riding according to the scenario and drive the action layer, which includes the HMI manager and a set of HMI elements (visual display, haptic handle, vibratinggloveand helmet) employedto warn the rider on acoustic, visual and tactile channels.