Development of an experimental protocol fortesting new electric personal mobility vehicles

The growing trend toward electric personal mobility vehicles introduces new partic-ipants in the world of mobility, giving new challenges and new potential hazards totraditional road users. This fast growth has also given hard times to road regula-tors to follow the trend which generated a lack of rules, especially due to a lack ofknowledge on the behavior of these vehicles and their users.The goal of this thesis was to develop a data collection and data analysis procedureto objectively compare these vehicles.Four vehicles were chosen to be tested: a conventional bike, an e-bike, an e-scooter,and a segway. A set of four different maneuvers was developed to simulate real-worldriding scenarios: 1) a "gentle" and 2) a "harsh" maneuver to evaluate the longitudinalbehavior of these vehicles, 3) a "slalom" maneuver to evaluate the lateral motion and4) an "unexpected" maneuver to evaluate the rider’s reaction after an unpredictedevent. Performance indicators of stability, maneuverability, and comfort, that wereto be analyzed for the four vehicles, were defined. In order to record the performanceindicators, motion, steering, and speed sensors were mounted on the vehicles, whilean external LIDAR sensor recorded the vehicles’ trajectories. An experimental pro-cedure capable of collecting the data for the analysis was developed. The procedureconsisted of a briefing with the participant, a test phase in which the participantcompleted the four tasks on each of the four vehicles, and a questionnaire to be filledat the end regarding the experience during the test phase. Two pilot tests were or-ganized in order to assess the procedure and to collect data from nine participants.The experimental procedure has demonstrated to be solid and ready for future datacollections. Some guidelines have been defined after the pilot tests for what con-cerns the analysis of the vehicles’ behavior. The segway demonstrated to be themost difficult to be used by the participants as it required longer training time andwas graded as the least safe in the questionnaire. A long brake reaction time andlow braking capabilities confirmed this observation. For the e-scooter, instead, highmaneuverability in the slalom and fast acceleration from standing still are counter-posed to low braking capabilities. Bike and e-bike, instead, were mainly graded thesame according to safety. Riders exhibited excellent braking capabilities for both bi-cycles, that proved to be very stable and maneuverable in the longitudinal direction,while less maneuverable in the lateral direction. The short brake reaction times forboth bikes resulted in a high level of maneuverability and safety.