DETC2009-86959 SOME OBSERVATIONS ON HUMAN CONTROL OF A BICYCLE

The purpose of this study is to identify human control ac-tions in normal bicycling. The task under study is the stabiliza-tion of the mostly unstable lateral motion of the bicycle-rider system. This is done by visual observation of the rider and mea-suring the vehicle motions. The observations show that very little upper-body lean occurs and that stabilization is done by steering control actions only. However, at very low forward speed a sec-ond control is introduced to the system: knee movement. More-over, all control actions are performed at the pedaling frequency, whilst the amplitude of the steering motion increases rapidly with decreasing forward speed