The Design of an Electro-Mechanical Bicycle for an Immersive Virtual Environment

Roughly 50,000 people are injured in bicycle collisions with motor vehicles each year, approximately 6,000 of these injuries involve children less than 14 years old. To better understand which factors put bicycling children at risk for motor vehicle collisions, researchers at the University of Iowa built a virtual environment that simulates the experience of riding through a town and crossing roads with motor vehicles traffic. The stationary bicycle, the focus of this report, replicates the pedal forces experienced by a rider. The stationary bike also provides the simulator with the bicycle’s velocity and steering angle. This report describes the design of the system, which features a flywheel designed to represent the rider and bike inertia, the mechanical linkages between the rider and an electric motor, and a system to measure steering angles. The bicycle has been built and tested and is currently in use in the virtual environment.