Assistance systems for bicycles

With the increasing spread of e-bikes, the number of accidents is also rising. An increase of more than 50% compared to last year, to over 2900 accidents, can be observed [BR24]. Many accidents occur due to excessive speed and/or riding into oncoming traffic (oncoming cyclists). A similar development was observed with the introduction of the automobile. Step by step, more and more active safety features (ESP, Emergency Brake Warning, ACC, …) were introduced in addition to passive ones (seat belts, airbags). In the bicycle sector, besides passive safety functions such as safety vests and helmets, active safety functions are not yet widespread.

Overview

In this project, a warning system for cyclists shall be developed. The system shall consist of low-cost components, exterozeptive sensors (e.g. camera, ultrasonic sensors) as well as propriozeptive sensors (e.g. accelerometer, gyroscope), be energy-efficient and compact in design so that it can be mounted unobtrusively on an e-bike.

Project shall be extended to various usecases such as

• Scene interpretation with respect to other cyclists and/or pedestrians
• Classification of unsafe/unstable driving behavior
• Recognition of potential hazards in the environment, e.g. potholes, high curbs,…

This project is kindly supported by Kettler Alu-Rad GmbH.

Completed thesis

(click titles for more information)

K.R. Hegyi: Entwicklung, Implementierung und Auswertung eines KI-basierten Bildklassifikators zur Erkennung verschiedener Straßenarten für Fahrräder, August 2023

Details to be added.

M. Kreis: Machine-learning based dead reckoning using IMU sensors for bicycles, February 2023

The aim of this thesis is to implement different deep learning methods and evaluate if they can be used to accurately estimate the 6-D pose of a bicycle, based on IMU measurements of a 6-DOF IMU.

The following requirements must be met by the algorithm:

• Accounting for sensor noise and biases
• Fusing of measurements data from multiple IMUs
• Capable of real-time computation

A video-SLAM algorithm has been implemented to serve as a state-of-the-art comparison and showed a good performance.

T. Munkhbaatar: Monokamera-basierte Klassifikation und Distanzschätzung von Verkehrsteilnehmern, January 2023

This thesis focused on the development of a neural network-based classification of cyclists, pedestrians, cars, and trucks. Two popular datasets have been used for the training, namely the KITTI Vision Benchmark Suite and the Tsinghua-Daimler Cyclist Detection Benchmark Dataset. While the accuracy of the classification of cars was as expected, the accuracy to detect cyclist was unexpectedly poor. A deeper analysis of the datasets revealed that the number of cyclists labels are insufficient. Nevertheless, the potential of detection performance could be highlighted with self-recorded videos.

J. Ruf: Untersuchung einer Distanzmetrik für eine kamerabasierte Fahrrad-Sicherheitsfunktion, July 2022

In this thesis, an efficient object detection algorithm has been implemented to detect cyclist and a criticality metric has been investigated for its real-time capability using a monocular camera running on a Raspberry Pi 3b. Specifically, a machine learning algorithm had to identify relevant features per cyclist and tracked these features over time via the optical flow.

As both, detected cyclist and moving, the consistent identification and tracking of relevant features is a challenge, especially in scenarios with high background noise. As a result, a feature outlier detection is of importance. Various algorithms have been investigated and analyzed for the real-time capability running on a Raspberry Pi 3b.

Based on the scaling of the detected features, a time-to-collision (TTC) can be well estimated. As the results show, the TTC is accurate up to 3 seconds, which is sufficient for the system to warn the cyclist of an upcoming critical situation.

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