How smooth is your ride?
Moritz Beeking, Hannah Wies, Markus Steinmaßl, Karl Rehrl (2024): How smooth is your ride? Comparison of sensorsand methods for surface quality assessmentusing IMUs. In: Traffic Safety Research
As a major component of riding comfort, surface roughness has a significant impact onpeoples’ decision to ride bicycles. Riding comfort is most commonly derived from accelerationsmeasured by inertial measurement units (IMUs). However, roughness metrics from different worksare not directly comparable as no ‘benchmark data’ exists. This work aims at alleviating this problemby comparing several well-established methods from literature on the same data. Furthermore,to quantify the effect of different sensor systems, for each test run data from both a smartphoneand an industrial grade IMU were collected. To compare the derived roughness measurements,the reliability and stability of each sensor-method combination is calculated using non-parametricstatistics. The results indicate handlebar mounted smartphones to be sufficient for surface roughnessassessment. Furthermore, the selected roughness calculation method has the biggest impact on resultingassessments, above the impacts of both sensor and analyzed segment length. Based on the results,recommendations for surface roughness assessment are provided in the conclusion.
