Human Control of a Bicycle: Jason K. Moore

Preface

«  Acknowledgements   ::   Contents   ::   Introduction  »

Preface

Introduction

The typical conversation with someone I’ve met over the past years that I’ve been a graduate student inevitably comes to this: “So what do you do in graduate school?”. My reply is “I study how people balance on bicycles”. This is a great conversation starter as almost everyone recalls learning how to ride a bicycle. It is something we weren’t born to do and we almost always remember the feeling of learning the skill. It is typically quite a momentous occasion in most folks’ lives. Usually everyone thinks the research is cool and can identify with it, but the next question (as with most research), is “What application is that good for?”. As an engineer, we are trained to be application minded. It is certainly what drove me to start down this path in the first place. There is an answer to this second question, but over the years I’ve gotten less enthusiastic about trying to justify why I’m working on this project with respect to an immediate application. In many ways this is simply the reality for the growing scientist. It becomes obvious that basic science simply needs to be performed, without regard to what it may or may not accomplish. The benefits down the road are inevitable and there is a large body of evidence to support that. But nonetheless my initial curiosity about bicycle dynamics is rooted in application and it still is in many ways. But I’m content with understanding difficult problems for basic progression in learning and science.

My first inquiries about bicycle dynamics came from my attempts to design a recumbent bicycle frame for my senior design project at Old Dominion University. Recumbents are notorious for not being that easy to ride and we were building one for the annual ASME Human Powered Vehicle challenge which would be especially unusual with an extremely low center of gravity. It needed to be suitable for novice riders to control. I found myself in the design process where one needs to choose the wheel sizes, front end geometry and location and seating position of the rider. As a young engineer is taught, I went looking for technical guidelines to choose these parameters for our bicycle design. But all I came back with were many conflicting ideas from various bicycle fabricators and the book Bicycling Science 2nd Ed [WW82] which gave a synopsis of Jones’ [Jon70] conclusions from his famous study on the stability of bicycles. I studied this in detail and designed my bicycle geometry to be exactly what was specified as good handling by Jones.[1] The bicycle turned out to be rideable (after lots of practice), but this was probably the first time I realized in my engineering career that there isn’t a formula for everything.

These particulars fell onto the back burner as I finished my work at the Langley Full Scale Tunnel and did not re-emerge until a few classes at UC Davis brought these concepts back into my picture. In particular, I attempted to derive the equations of motion of the bicycle in Mont Hubbard’s multi-body dynamics class at the beginning of 2006 and the power to potentially properly answer the questions I had back at Old Dominion seemed to be at my finger tips. Little did I realize that those answers simply introduced more difficult questions and a research project was born.

This dissertation documents most of the work I’ve done and my thoughts on bicycle dynamics, control, and handling at UC Davis and TU Delft since around December 2006.

Reproducibility

Over the past few years, I’ve begun realize how reproducibility is crucial for science to improve and grow rapidly, all the while building a deeply intact and strong foundation for future researchers and that it may not be as reproducible as we may all think. With that in mind, I have put a great deal of effort into making my work more accessible, reusable, and ultimately reproducible, which is the cornerstone of all scientific understanding. For the type of work presented here, the majority is computational and the computer along with software have enabled our generation to make the work reproducible without too much extra effort. My intention is provide enough information in the form of data, source code, and writing, that others will have a relatively easy time reproducing my work. This has been mostly possible in the time frame that I’ve had to complete the thesis, but there are some holes in particular with respect to the work done in the earlier years of the project.

Literature

I really enjoy reading older dissertations and technical reports because they typically have so much detail, much more than any journal paper will ever have. I find these details to be invaluable for developing new research plans and understanding. This is especially true when the null science is reported, which gives a much better idea of what not to do. My dissertation is modeled after these longer documents and I’ve attempted to include as much detail in the decision making processes, methods, and results as possible.

This dissertation is partly original work that has not been published in any form and partly based on several journal and conference papers that I have written or co-authored over the years. I’ve given an outline below of the papers which have been subsumed into this thesis.

[FMPM06]
This is an internal report done with two other students in my modern controls class. We developed several controllers for a simple bicycle model. Some elements of this paper influenced Chapter Control.
[Moo06]
This is the internal report which described my first effort at deriving the equations of motion of the bicycle[2], estimating the physical parameters of the bicycle/rider, and running a numerical parameter study.
[MPH07]
Luke Peterson and I wrote this short paper for the 11th International Symposium on Computer Simulation in Biomechanics in Tainan, Taiwan. We presented a basic rider biomechanic extension to the Whipple model which I had developed in [Moo06]. This contributes directly to Chapter Extensions of the Whipple Model.
[MH08]
This is the polished and corrected version of [Moo06] which was submitted to the 2008 International Sports Engineering Conference in Biarritz, France. The model derivation is written out thoroughly in Chapter Bicycle Equations Of Motion, the physical parameter estimation in Chapter Physical Parameters, and the parameter studies in Chapter Parameter Studies.
[KS08]
Jodi Kooijman presented this paper at a conference in Hungary not long after I had been in the Netherlands. It contained the results from the experimental studies we did during my first few months in Delft.
[MKS09]
I presented this paper at the 2009 Multibody Dynamics conference in Warsaw, Poland. This work focused on the motion identification experiments we did early in 2009.
[MKHS09]
This paper presented a combination of the bicycle measurement technique used in [Koo06] and an improved version of the human inertia estimation technique developed in [Moo06]. I presented it at the 2009 ASME conference in San Diego, CA.[3]
[KSM09]
This is a polished version of [KS08]. Jodi Kooijman presented it at the 2009 ASME conference. This work is presented in Chapter Delft Instrumented Bicycle.
[MHP+10]
This is a report on the work I did in the last few months I spent in Delft in which I used a modified technique from [Koo06] to more accurately measure the physical parameters of a variety of bicycles. I presented it as a poster at the first Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics Conference in 2010.
[MHS+10]
Jodi Kooijman presented this paper for me at the International Sports Engineering Conference in 2010. It was about simple statistical analyses of the data we collected in [MKHS09]. This work can be found in Chapter Motion Capture.
[PMFH10]
Dr. Hubbard presented this paper for us at the ISEA conference in 2010. It gave a preliminary look at the instrumented/robot bicycle we were developing.
[MKSH11]
The paper written for the conference in Warsaw, [MKS09], was accepted to be published in Multibody System Dynamics. It is a polished version of [MKS09] and is presented in Chapter Motion Capture.
[HMH12]
This work was originally presented at the Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics conference in 2010 and eventually published by IEEE in 2012. The work is expanded on and detailed in Chapter Control.

Source Code

It is very possible to code every computation that an engineer does and in many ways the most preferable method to record it. It is not only a record of the working computation that contains all of the details needed but an executable source that can be reused. But this doesn’t mean one can simply drop all of their undocumented scripts into a folder, publish it to the web and expect anyone to ever be able to decipher it and actually use it. It takes much more effort to document the source code and to put it into a usable form. These techniques are very rarely, if at all, taught to engineers. Once I got a taste of the development methods of software engineers and computer scientists I couldn’t believe how poorly we engineers execute our code. Not only does creating usable and well documented code help others to use it, but it helps you to know what it is and be able to reuse it yourself. It is documented proof of working methods. I have no idea how much code “waste” is on my hard drive that I will never have the time to decipher again and make use of it.

I have several layers of code that supports this document. In general, all of the figures and tables are generated by scripts in the src directory included with the source to this dissertation. These scripts access a variety packages in my software stack with most of them being open source packages that I or some of my collaborators have written. The following gives a list of the packages we’ve developed:

AutolevToolKit (Python)
A collection of tools which parse Autolev output for extracting the equations of motion and some basic tool to convert them to LaTeX. It has a prototype of a numerical dynamic system class with accompanying linear dynamic system class to make basic analysis quick and painless.
BicycleDAQ (Matlab)
A GUI tool that collects time series and meta data from the instrumented bicycle via the NI USB-6218 data acquisition board and the VectorNav VN-100. It has tools for also collecting calibration data for the various sensors.
BicycleDataProcessor (Python)
A tool that stores all of the data collected from the instrumented bicycle in a database for easy retrieval and manipulation. It also processes the raw data into the variables of interest, so you can directly compare it with models.
BicycleID (Python
A GTK GUI for visualizing the bicycle model identification data.
BicycleParameters (Python) [Moo11]
A program that generates the physical parameters of a bicycle and rider from experimental measurements. It also allows for basic manipulation and analysis with some widely used models.
BicycleSystemID (Matlab & Python)
A set of tools for interacting with the Matlab System ID toolbox. It has functions built around the grey and black box identification of several bicycle, rider and control models.
CanonicalBicycleID (Python)
A module for identifying a 4th order bicycle model from the canonical form.
DelftBicycleDataViewer (Matlab)
A prototype video and data viewer for the Delft instrumented bicycle data.
DynamicistToolKit (Python)
A clearing house for all the generic functions and classes that I write that may be useful across all the work I do.
HumanControl (Matlab)
An implementation of our bicycle human control model from [HMH12] and Chapter Control. It computes the controller parameters for most bicycles and most speeds, simulates the model during lane changes, and computes a handling quality metric.
MotionCapture (Python & Matlab)
A Matlab GUI tool for interactively exploring the data from the bicycle motion capture experiments and python tools for basic statistics.
Yeadon (Python) [Dem11]
A program that computes the inertia of a human using the method from [Yea90b].

This software stack is built upon several languages and software packages including: Python, NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, PyTables, Pandas, Uncertainties, SymPy, Autolev, Matlab. Each software package will have a git tag called dissertation to pin it to the version used to generate all the results in the text.

Data

During the experimental studies, I’ve collected a fair amount of data and have worked to provide at least the raw data from the experimental studies with enough meta data for it to be reusable. Also, the data is used directly with the software packages above. All of the data described below is accessible through the bicycle data page on our lab website: http://biosport.ucdavis.edu/research-projects/bicycle/data.

Physical Parameters
The physical parameter data consists of measured values, such as geometry and mass, of both the bicycles and the riders.
Delft Instrumented Bicycle
This data is in the form of comma separated text files with the time histories of the sensors and accompanying meta data in the header of each file. The various treadmill experiments with two riders are included. This includes video data for each of the runs.
Motion Capture
This data set includes Matlab mat files for each run for several days of experimenting with several riders on the treadmill. There is also video data for a good portion of the runs.
Steer Torque Experiments
There is video data for each run and also the manually derived comma separated value text file with the torque values determined from the video.
Identification Experiments
This data is available both as raw data mat files with included meta data for each run and as a single HDF5 database which stores the time histories of the sensors in multiple arrays and the meta data in tables. Video data of all the runs were also recorded.
Photos
I’ve taken extensive photo documentation of the instrumentation construction and the experiments. The albums are divided into ones of the work done at UC Davis and the work done at TU Delft.

Dissertation website

I decided to publish my dissertation publicly on the internet from the day I started writing it. The first reason for this is that I want to take full advantage of the ability the web offers for conveying ideas and information, whether it be a video or an interactive program. Paper-based publication is a thing of the past and is an unbelievably limited form of sharing, especially in science. Secondly, I want the process of writing my dissertation to be in the open with the ability for anyone to offer comments, suggestions and edits. Dissertations are traditionally considered to be the work of a single individual, but that is never true. All the research we do as scientists is built upon the works of others and rarely does anyone produce their work without the help of others. Dissertations in the USA are typically very individualistically oriented but I’ve begun to believe that we should strive to move away from the idea that some work is only due to one person and embrace the fact that we need help from many people to complete something like a dissertation for a doctoral degree. So it is best to be collaborative from the beginning with a sufficient mechanism to provide credit where credit is due. I also want this work to be the best it can be, and if others are interested in helping me make it that way then an interactive website is a platform that is capable of promoting this.

I desired to follow these basic rules when writing my dissertation:

  • The content should be written presentation format neutral.
  • The primary presentation view is through a web browser, but a static PDF version is also available to suit UCD’s archaic submission rules.
  • The source code for all the figures, animations, and interactive bits should be included with the dissertation.
  • The experimentally collected data should all be available for download and use by others.
  • Software tools should be developed if at all possible, instead of disconnected scripts.

Based on these goals, I choose the Sphinx publishing platform for my dissertation. The text source, which is written in reStructuredText, is available along with the source code for the figures at https://github.com/moorepants/dissertation. The HTML version can be viewed and the PDF version downloaded at http://moorepants.github.com/dissertation

Writing Style

I generally find scientific writing in my field to be extremely dry. We’ve developed a collective style that removes any material that isn’t technical from the articles and this in turn causes us to gloss over the fact that people are behind all of the reported research. These people have ideas, struggles, mishaps, revelations, and sometimes even fun. But these things weren’t always hidden. Early engineering articles ended with lengthy personal conversations between the reviewers and the authors ([Wil51], [Kon55]) and include much more artistic and beautiful illustrations. Page limits in journal and conference articles force today’s writer to make their writing as dry as possible to maximize the amount of technical content. I’m no writing ace, but have decided to inject some of the humanism that comes along with a project than spans seven years of ones life into this text. I mostly corralled these ramblings in the prefaces and footnotes of the chapters, but some has sneaked into the drier areas too. I hope that these asides give some idea of how all of this work developed and who to attribute the ideas and labor to along with breaking up the monotony of the technical parts of the text. I figured that a dissertation will be one of the few writings in my career that provides a chance to do this.

Attribution

As a child, I was programmed to think that any form of plagiarism was evil: you shouldn’t copy anything. But how would we ever make any progress if we didn’t copy and improve on what others have done in the past? The work presented here is mostly based on the work that I have done in the past several years, but there are many other people’s work that is wrapped up in it. Their writings and thoughts will inevitably be present in this text. I do not claim these as my own, but they will be required to tell the story of the research. I will do my best to acknowledge everyone’s work in this thesis, but there will surely be some that I have forgotten. Please let me know if that is so, and I will remedy it.

Notation

I attempt to keep notation consistent throughout each chapter, with much of the notation being consistent throughout the dissertation. The extensions chapter has different notation for each model. The notation for the Chapter is given at the end of each Chapter. There are ultimately two notations forms for the bicycle: mine which follows a Kane-like syntax and the one adapted from [MPRS07].

License

The written work and data are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

You may share, rework, and use any of the materials provided you cite this work

Moore, J. K., Human Control of a Bicycle, UC Davis Doctoral Dissertation, 2012

All of the source code is licensed explicitly in the src directory under a BSD license.

Footnotes

[1]It was not untill after welding the bicycle frame together that I realized that I’d cut a tube too long and the geometry was very different than I’d planned.
[2]The equations derived here are slightly incorrect.
[3]I remember this being a poor presentation on my part. I arrived in San Diego after living for a year in the Netherlands. My mind was lost in experiencing everything I missed about my home country and I couldn’t focus on properly preparing for the presentation.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

«  Acknowledgements   ::   Contents   ::   Introduction  »

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License