Triumphrat

Robin Hood

A few months back I posted about a team at the University of Nottingham using a Triumph Daytona to build a motorcycle simulator.

I caught up with the team's progress earlier this week and here's a video showing where they are at (building the sensors, actuators to move the bike, etc)



Interested to read any comments... and for those wanting to see the earlier video for a bit of extra context, you'll find it here:

mistermellow001

How cool to have a chance to apply learned engineering to a practical application. Not many of us have that chance.

I still don't understand how they're going to deal with inertial and centrifugal forces, and other seat-of-the-pants inputs. So far all I see is visual and axial manipulation, but if you don't feel your butt firmly planted as you lean, it seems you'll simply feel like you're falling over.

Those are just questions and thoughts, not criticisms.

__________________
Guy

Robin Hood

Yeah, good points.

It is a bit outside my area of expertise not being an engineer or a rider... But I know from speaking to those involved that they have the attitude that this is "phase one"...

The project will need to evolve over time to become increasingly worthwhile as a realistic sim.

MickMaguire

I wonder, in reality, how much better / different his will be from the old "motorcycle simulator" arcade games.... Unless they can sort out inertia etc. the only thing I can really see is it might handle slightly more realisticly


Isn't that the "can you hear me now" guy?

__________________
Mick...

TucsonBill

The FAA used to have some simulators that they used to demonstrate bad things that can happen to general education pilots. The basic premise was to disconnect visual clues from actual movements. Bear with me.....
You're on the bike entering a right turn. The bike leans right, and two forces are acting on you. Gravity is pulling you down, and another force is pulling you left, negating the gravity. Without the other force generated by the turn, it's true, you would fall off the bike to the right. Now, put bike and rider in a box with the visual clues coming from a video screen. You see a right turn coming on the screen and begin to enter the turn by leaning right. If the whole box, bike and rider, are leaned to the left, gravity will press you into the seat as if you really are turning at speed!
You have to have experienced the FAA simulators to understand just how easy it is to totally screw up your senses when movement and vision are disconnected and how low-tech solutions can be real neat!

__________________
William Fee
Iron Butt #26777
Tucson, Arizona

fivehundo

I wonder if it has a High-Side crash feature that will toss you across the room...

__________________
"The Father wove the skein of your life a long time ago. Go and hide in a hole if you wish, but you won't live one instant longer. Your fate is fixed. Fear profits a man nothing." Herger the Joyous

mistermellow001

Why not? We are talking about making this as real as possible!

TucsonBill, that is the answer, I think. They need to enclose the thing into a movable room. They even had those in shopping malls for awhile, and the effect was very realistic.

__________________
Guy

Major Kong

Tucsonbill is mostly correct when he talks about the "tricking" of the balance center- the inner ear. However, the forces of a turn are a little skewed. Gravity always pulls toward the center of the earth.

There is no such thing as centrifugal force. The force that you feel against the direction of the turn is actually inertia. As a body takes a curved path, the forward momentum is trying to make the body depart the curve (at every point in the curve) at a tangent to the curve (returning to a straight path). This is what is often referred to as centrifugal force.

There is such a thing as centripetal force. That is the force that causes a body to move in an arc (an inward turning force). The greater the speed for a specific arc, the greater the inertia, hence, the more you get pushed into the seat. Conversely, the tighter the arc, for a constant speed, the greater the inertial force will be.

In a simulator, for a given speed and arc, the device would have to stimulate the inner ear so as to give the illusion of inertia.

As far as a high side is concerned, it absolutely could toss you. Assuming that the simulator had enough range of motion, and the loading actuators were fast enough, it could probably kill you. Just like a bad high side could kill you.

Kong

__________________
"You don't know what you don't know."