Motorcyclist safety: Connected motorcycle pilot

This project will investigate the use of Co-operative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) technologies to improve road safety for motorcycle riders, with the research to be undertaken concurrently in Queensland and Victoria, in off-road scenarios.

Motorcycle riders are over-represented in fatal and serious injury crashes compared to other transport modes – too many riders’ lives are lost to preventable crashes. This project will leverage emerging C-ITS technologies to connect riders with infrastructure, cloud and vehicle data providing alerts to improve rider awareness to relevant real-time safety issues.

Connections to data, existing systems and a desirable, safe, and co-designed usable Human Machine Interface (HMI) will require development in partnership with a motorcycle rider panel of experts.

Additionally, simulated and off-road trials with riders will enable studying of the system’s performance, safety impact and user perception, for the purpose of recommendations for industry and government.

Participants

• Department of Transport and Main Roads (Queensland)
• Transport Accident Commission
• La Trobe University

Project background

Motorcycle rider fatalities and serious injuries are a major issue and are overrepresented in road crashes. Emerging technologies have the potential to integrate motorcycle riders into new a connected system to improve safety outcomes leading to reduced impacts on individuals, communities, and governments, society, and communities.

Motorcycle riders are a highly vulnerable road user group that industry, academia, and governments want to support by developing safe systems contributing to reaching vision zero (road deaths and serious injuries).

Australia is deploying infrastructure to support connected vehicles, for example Queensland’s Ipswich Connected Vehicle Pilot and Bruce Highway deployment; Victoria’s Australian Integrated Multimodal EcoSystem (AIMES). More recently laying the foundations for policy the Australian Government released the Draft Principles for the National Approach to Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems.

Road safety is a critical component of the Cooperative C-ITS standards and use cases, with a growing focus on developing data and interfaces. C-ITS presents an emerging opportunity to improve motorcycle rider safety and is being investigated internationally for example, Connected Motorcycle Consortium.

This study aims to identify and test motorcycle rider C-ITS use cases that have the potential to reduce motorcycle crashes. Ideally the data needs to be readily available through existing sources to provide near-term benefits.

Queensland’s Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) C-ITS deployment currently includes the following data:

• Infrastructure to Vehicle (I2V) – advanced red-light warning (ARLW), turning warning of vulnerable road users at traffic lights (TWVR)
• Cloud to Vehicle (C2V) – roadworks, dangerous curve, road hazard, back of queue, speed limit (variable, static, school), rest area, and overtaking lane.
• Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) – slow stopped vehicle, emergency electronic brake light

Queensland’s C-ITS ecosystem will be used to minimise the technology capital investment for the project – this includes the centralised data broker, remote field device management, and data capture services. TMR has deployed C-ITS devices to RACQ’s Mount Cotton Mobility Centre of Excellence test facility, which may be used for off-road testing.

Given La Trobe University’s location in Melbourne, and the involvement of the Transport Accident Commission, testing will also occur in Victoria. Testing will be conducted in environments such as in-lab, and offroad test beds. Cross-jurisdictional collaboration on the project will ensure engagement with a wide cross section of motorcycle riders.

This project intends to leverage existing deployments, assets, and capital. This includes TMR’s existing:

• roadside stations for intersection messaging
• vehicle stations for message reception
• use case triggering and data collection
• central cloud services for remote maintenance, monitoring, data collection and storage, and long-distance messaging.

Using existing systems will allow this project to focus on developing the rider-system HMI and producing novel research on specific considerations for motorcycle riders in a connected system. It is expected that the interface between the existing vehicle stations and HMI will require development as an HMI suitable for motorcycle riders is likely to be different to existing car-oriented HMI.

Project objectives

There’s been quite a bit of progress in the nine months this project has been running,

Highlights over that time include:

• Joining the Connected Motorcycle Consortium (CMC), founded by motorcycle manufacturers: Yamaha, Honda, KTM, Ducati, and BMW. Connections have also been made with Harley-Davidson and Savic Motorcycles.\Engaged with 30 vendors of HMI devices.
• Rider engagement: conducted quantitative research leveraging with almost 400 riders and collaborated face-to-face with over 60 riders. The survey was designed to identify factors that influence the adoption of C-ITS warning systems. It seems that self-proclaimed risky riders are less interested in C-ITS safety warnings. Riders who need it most, like it least, which is an example of an adoption challenge for the government and C-ITS industry.
• Normalised, aggregated, and analysed 5 years of crash data from Queensland and Victoria. The crash data analysis shows that well over half of the crashes requiring some, or serious medical attention, are situations where, at face value, C-ITS could have reduced the risk of collision or crash.
• Work with TMR and Cohda-wireless, including a 3-day training program in Queensland, to deliver an end-to-end test trial.
• Successful end-to-end demonstration, integrating various HMI devices into our prototype C-ITS, (smart helmet, smart glasses, haptic wristband, etc) and have developed our own LED warning system. A successful end-to-end system test was conducted, using data from various sources to generate a warning from the vehicle station / or OBU device, which was translated into a warning for the smart helmet and the haptic wristband.

The next phase of the project, involving co-developing a prototype with riders, is already well underway.

Click here to download a copy of the Connected Motorcycle Safety Summary Phase 1 progress report.

Please note …

This page will be a living record of this project. As it matures, hits milestones, etc., we’ll continue to add information, links, images, interviews and more. Watch this space!