Vision system for the measurement of the rider posture during motorbike riding

Inertial characteristics of human body are comparable to the motorcycle ones: the investigation of mutual interactions between driver and vehicle motions is necessary to study the dynamic behaviour of the complete system. In this work, an innovative approach to measure relative motion between driver and vehicle is presented, validated and subsequently applied to both steady state and transient tests. The measuring system is composed by a digital camera mounted on the vehicle that frames the movement of a target fixed on driver’s back. Acquired images are processed using a pose estimation software, able to reconstruct the 3D position and orientation of the target. The vehicle is instrumented with state of the art transducers to measure the motorcycle dynamic. Preliminary results on different track tests are presented.