[email hidden] (Shotokan) wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...
Quoted message said:Hi folks, I'm an Innovative Product Design student in
Dundee Scotland and my last brief was to design a short
range communication device that works over 20m. The user
group i have chosen is cyclists and now that the project
is a few weeks in i would really appreciate some feedback
and constructive criticism on my idea. The idea is that
when off-roading in groups and especially at night it is
difficult to determine where the bulk of the group is
going to go.
Route planning can be a non-trivial problem. The usual
solution is for bicyclists to repeatedly ride a limited
number of routes, so they learn to follow those routes. New
riders who are unfamiliar with a route can follow a rider
who is familiar, and keep that rider in sight.
Quoted message said:Also when just joining a group it is daunting to shout
for everyone to stop when a puncture or similar
problem occurs.
Very loud whistles are already on the market. They are
light, cheap, reliable, easy to operate, and can signal a
fairly long way in an emergency. Longer than shouting.
One drawback of a whistle is that the sender and recipient
would need to know Morse code or some other coding scheme to
send much information with a whistle. But generally one
blows the whistle to draw attention, and then people can see
if one has stopped and so on.
Quoted message said:Originally i aimed this to only used be accomplished
cyclists but further feedback has changed this and i now
think it would be especially good for children groups or
family cycling holidays.
Perhaps. If a group is not large, it's easy for two riders
to manage the group by using the leader/sweeper method. The
leader rides at the front to show the way. Members of the
group follow the leader. The sweeper rides at the back and
stops to wait for any group member who falls behind.
With this method, the leader only has to keep track of the
sweeper, for example by checking in his mirror to visually
confirm the sweeper is still in position, and slowing or
stopping the group as necessary to allow the sweeper (and
any stragglers) to rejoin.
Essentially the leader uses the sweeper's position to adjust
the group speed from the front. This allows the leader to
modulate the group speed to that of the slowest rider. Or,
if the slowest rider is willing to drop from the group and
ride alone, he tells the sweeper, who signals the leader to
maintain the present speed simply by remaining in position
at the back of the group.
Quoted message said:My proposed solution is a lightweight, handlebar mounted
display that uses digital compass technology to detect
where the group "leader" is going and shows this on a LED
pointer display.
It might be more useful for the leader to know where the
sweeper is. On a road course this is usually easy if the
sweeper is visible occasionally when the road bends. (The
leader cannot see through following riders when the group
is riding in a straight line, but when the road bends the
appropriate way---to the left in the United States, where
we ride on the right and mount our mirrors on our left---
the back of the group becomes visible. If the sweeper is
wearing distinctively bright clothing the leader easily
recognizes him.)
On a rough off-road course it's questionable whether a
bicyclist bouncing down the trail would be able to see any
sort of bike-mounted graphical display. Especially at night.
It might be necessary to wait until technology is available
to embed a usable heads-up-display into contact lenses. For
hands-free operation the system would need a robust speech
interface or perhaps a direct neural interface. Check back
in the year 2030, perhaps.
For a large group of riders to avoid getting separated on an
off-road course at night, they would all have to be familiar
with the course, or enough of them would have to be familiar
to enable the other riders to follow them.
Quoted message said:A visual alarm is also included so that a rider in trouble
can quickly alert everyone in the group when a problem
occurs. I am also thinking of including a lesser alarm
that notifies the riders behind of obstacles such as
fallen trees or hairpin bends but i am wary of how much
the device will weigh.
There are already headset radios on the market allowing two
people to send any message they can express in words.
The type of guidance system you have in mind would be
difficult to make self-contained on just the bikes, using
current technology which is unable to supply much
intelligence. Riders don't have a lot of intelligence to
spare because they must focus on the demanding task of
riding down trails without crashing into trees and boulders.
You could do a lot better by adding some human intelligence
in the form of a dispatcher sitting in a mission control
center. Put a GPS receiver/transponder on every bike, so the
dispatcher could track the locations of all bikes in real
time. The dispatcher could also receive and log reports of
trail conditions as you mentioned above, and notify
following riders through their headset radios as they
approach obstacles.
Obviously this arrangement would be some ridiculous overkill
for a typical recreational ride. However, police and
military organizations use similar methods to coordinate
their field operations. Having the dispatcher adds a lot,
because the dispatcher is free to allocate his/her full
attention to keeping track of the condition of the team and
its environment.
At some point in the future, tiny portable computers may get
smart enough to provide intelligence rivaling what today
requires a human dispatcher in a control center. Then it may
be possible to have a practical, portable system that can
monitor what everybody in a far-flung group is doing and
offer intelligent advice to riders who are straying off the
course or who may be speeding toward dangerous unseen
obstacles.
Essentially you would need a computer smart enough to ride a
bike itself and understand the implications of route
conditions and the group dynamics.
Quoted message said:Some feedback on this idea would be really useful. Thanks
in advance
A possibly more useful device would be a way to get complete
weather information along with local storm prediction and
warning when the bicyclist's scheduled path is likely to
intersect with a storm path. If the device could suggest
alternate routings around storms that could be useful. Where
I live (southwestern Ohio in the United States), every
summer we have numerous pop-up thunderstorms. Real-time
weather radar maps are available on the Web but as soon as I
get on my bike I'm limited to what I can see by looking at
the sky, and by two or three hours into a ride the weather
can be very different. Often my view of the sky is obscured
by trees and hills, and even under the best conditions I
have trouble judging the size of an approaching storm and
seeing it soon enough to change my route to dodge it.
A PDA with Web access and GPS could allow for some
interesting integration of routing and weather information.
You might look into the routing problem. Most off-the-shelf
route planning tools are not optimal for bicyclists, who
tend to choose different routes than automobile drivers.
Since bicyclists tend to ride particular routes repeatedly,
the first thing to include is a completely simple way to
generate route plans just by riding the routes. (This is
possible already with some GPS receivers.) It would also be
nice to have a completely simple method to automatically
integrate actual route information from many riders in one
central location. That way, over time, you could build up a
database of bicycle-appropriate routes with enough coverage
to be useful to a large percentage of future customers.
-- Daniel Mocsny
