Comfort-Oriented Gear Shifting in City Bicycles

Maximizing the comfort is a hard task in bicycles as the cyclist takes an active part in pedaling. Whatever the road quality is, discomfort always occurs during gear shifting. This paper proposes an algorithm for finding the best shifting moment, thus maximizing comfort. The solution has been addressed as an acceleration minimization. Some experiments, performed on a real set-up, are additionally provided, to quantify the comfort improvement.