A haptic-based, safety-oriented, braking assistance system for road bicycles

This paper presents a novel haptic support system for braking control in road bicycles. The basic idea is to provide a direct indication of the wheel deceleration to the rider in form of a brake lever vibration. The more intense the vibration, the closer the rider is to the threshold safe deceleration. This enables an efficient information transfer and an easy, safe deceleration. The paper presents the rationale and the proposed system. The performance is assessed through a number of experimental tests, showing that the presence of the haptic feedback enables the rider to brake more safely and more consistently than without haptic feedback.