Giovanni Savino

University of Florence | UNIFI · Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale

Objective. Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) acts to slow down a vehicle when an unavoidable impending collision is detected. In addition to documented benefits when applied to passenger cars, AEB has also shown potential when applied to motorcycles (MAEB). However, the feasibility of MAEB as practically applied to motorcycles in the real world is...

This study presents a triggering algorithm for a collaborative, motorcycle-to-car collision avoidance system that slows down the car without input of the driver when the collision becomes imminent. The algorithm is based on the concept of inevitable collision states. Example applications of the proposed algorithm were obtained via 2D computer simul...

This paper presents a method to identify inevitable collision states (ICS) specifically for a motorcycle when interacting with an opponent passenger car in typical traffic scenarios. Previous ICS methods were applied to passenger cars or generic vehicles; however, the peculiarities of motorcycles urge the definition of specific methods for these ve...

Objective: In 2006, Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking (MAEB) was developed by a European Consortium (Powered Two Wheeler Integrated Safety, PISa) as a crash severity countermeasure for riders. This system can detect an obstacle through sensors in the front of the motorcycle and brakes automatically to achieve a 0.3 g deceleration if the coll...

The development of advanced riding assistance systems requires the analysis of user reactions in emergency situations. Motorcycle riding simulators are an alternative to ‘on-road’ testing so that virtual environment dangerous scenarios can be investigated without risks for the participants. In this paper, we propose a process for validation of a lo...

Due to current environmental European regulations in terms of pollutant emissions, electric cargo cycles are receiving growing interest compared to heavy-duty vehicles as a cheaper and healthier alternative for last-mile delivery of goods in urban and suburban areas. Within the PNRR Next Generation EU program, the Sustainable Mobility Center aims t...

Tyre-road interaction governs motorcycle dynamics; however, the most widespread tyre model formulations must be characterised through a dedicated test bench on the lab or road, unavailable to many interested subjects. This article proposed a new tyre model formulation, conceived to be characterised through riding data using standard instrumentation...

Human errors are the primary cause of powered two-wheeler crashes worldwide due to the demanding control required and the often ineffective rider-training programs. Literature on rider behaviour is limited, partly due to the lack of standard investigation methodologies. This work investigated the differences in riding style and capability of a div...

This study aims to investigate whether motorcyclists are able to use the full potential of anti-lock braking systems (ABS) in demanding braking situations that maintain the natural coupling of action and perception of emergency events, or whether instead the lack of braking skills in riders makes ABS almost ineffective and comparable to non-ABS bra...

Braking assistance systems are already contributing to improving motorcyclists' safety; however, research on emergency systems acting on the steering is lacking. These systems, already available for passenger cars, could prevent or mitigate motorcycle crashes in which safety functions based only on braking are ineffective. The first research questi...

Powered-Two-Wheelers (PTW) riders’ fatalities are prevalent on bends outside built-up areas due to the complexity and instability of their vehicles: countermeasures require a better understanding of the rider-PTW interaction. Analysing riding data is effective but becomes challenging when using extensive datasets; segmenting the riding data would h...

Steering torque constitutes the primary motorcycle control input for the lateral dynamics; consequently, estimating it is important. Conventionally, this is done with complete motorcycle models, requiring significant identification effort. The simplified models in the literature only describe the steering torque under specific cases. This work defi...

The mortality of road accidents quadruples when, in addition to motorists, a motorcyclist is also involved. The higher mortality is influenced by the greater exposure of the rider to injuries during the impact. This problem can be mitigated by reducing, even slightly, the impact’s speed. Bench tests carried out by previous studies showed a consider...

Objective Active safety systems such as motorcycle autonomous emergency braking (MAEB) capable of ensuring effectiveness and safe rider–vehicle interaction present many potential benefits to reduce road fatalities but also many challenges. The whole development cycle of MAEB requires research through extensive field tests that reproduce unexpected...

Autonomous Emergency Braking on Motorcycles (MAEB) was shown to be a promising technology to improve Powered-Two-Wheeler (PTW) user safety, deploying autonomously a braking action to reduce impact speed when pre-crash conditions are detected. The applicability of MAEB with effective working parameters still needs to be proved in real-world working...

Correctly reproducing the roll effects to obtain a realistic riding experience is still an open issue in motorcycle simulators. This goal becomes more challenging if the motorcycle simulator uses a car dynamic model, such as the simulator of the MOVING. This study has defined a control logic integrated with the pre-existing model to reproduce the e...

Motorcycle simulators are employed for rider training, studying human-machine interaction, and developing assistance systems. However, existing simulators are either too simple and, therefore, unsuitable or significantly complex, with higher hardware costs and familiarisation times. This study aimed to use a tuned single-track car model as the basi...

Objective: Vehicles are increasingly being equipped with Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) and literature highlights the utility to fit a similar active safety system in Powered Two-Wheelers (PTWs). This research attempts to analyze the efficacy of PTW Autonomous Emergency Braking (MAEB) when functioning solely, and in the case where both the PTW...

Research question: Pre-Crash Braking (PCB) is a promising technology currently under safety by providing automatic braking input and reducing impact speed in pre-crash conditions. However, the implementation of the PCB as a system that influences motorcycle control, remains controversial from the perspective of the users. This study, conducted with...

Objective Safely negotiating curves with a powered-two-wheeler (PTW) requires a high level of skill, and a significant proportion of PTW crashes have a curve involvement. This study aimed to estimate the applicability, potential benefits and feasibility of novel Motorcycle Curve Assist (MCA). The system is designed to operate an emergency control o...

The role of powered two-wheeler (PTW) transport from the perspective of a more sustainable mobility system is undermined by the associated high injury risk due to crashes. Motorcycle-based active safety systems promise to avoid or mitigate many of these crashes suffered by PTW riders. Despite this, most systems are still only in the prototype phase...

Among the rider assistance systems for powered-two-wheelers (PTWs) that are currently in the developing stage, autonomous emergency braking (identified by the acronym MAEB - Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking) was shown to be promising to significantly improve the safety of such vehicles. This system, which is already available on passenger ca...

Although diverse tyre model formulations exist in the literature, they are suited for characterisation using a dedicated test bench, preventing parameters' estimation in driving conditions. This study defined a novel motorcycle tyre model, characterisable through driving manoeuvres using simple instrumentation consisting in an inertial measurement...

Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) is a promising technology in the future of motorcycle safety, since it could be effective in reducing the consequences of crashes. To evaluate whether a personal experience of the intervention may influence the acceptance of such a system, an analysis of the results of a field study conducted in realistic pre-cras...

Objective Recent field-tests on Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (MAEB) showed that higher levels of deceleration to improve its effectiveness were feasible. However, the potential of MAEB in mitigating rider injuries is not well understood, particularly in scenarios where the efficacy of standard MAEB is limited because the rider is...

Objective Motorcycle helmets are the most common and effective protective device to reduce head injuries and mortality in crashes among powered two-wheeler riders. Even if they are globally recognized as effective, there are still concerns regarding their correct use, which is necessary to achieve maximum head protection. The goal of this systemati...

Objective Human error by either rider or other vehicle driver is the primary contributing factor in crashes involving powered-two-wheelers. A human-factor-based crash analysis methodology is key to enhancing the road safety effectiveness of rider training interventions. Our aim is to define a methodology that uses in-depth data to identify the skil...

Objective Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) is a promising technology for crash avoidance or pre-crash impact speed reduction through the automatic application of braking force. Implementation of AEB technology on motorcycles (MAEB) is still problematic as its interaction with the rider may compromise the safety. In previous studies, MAEB interven...

This paper defines a methodology with in-depth data to identify the skills needed by riders in the highest risk crash configurations to reduce casualty rates. We present a case study using in-depth data of 803 powered-two-wheeler crashes. Seven high-risk crash configuration based on the pre-crash trajectories of the road-users involved were conside...

Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (MAEB), is a technology that introduces also on Powered-Two-Wheelers (PTWs) the autonomous braking, which is able to apply autonomously a braking force to reduce impact speed in emergency situations. This system was shown to be possibly effective in reducing numbers of deaths and serious injuries resul...

Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking (MAEB) is a rider assistance that may soon play a role for the improved safety for Powered-Two-Wheeler users. Several studies were carried out to investigate the feasibility of automatic braking (AB) events. In a recent experiment, tests were conducted with volunteer participants to assess AB intervention und...

Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) was proved to be an effective and reliable technology in reducing serious consequences of road vehicles crashes. However, the feasibility in terms of end-users’ acceptability for the AEB for motorcycles (MAEB) still has to be evaluated. So far, only Automatic Braking (AB) activations in straight-line motion and de...

The aim of the study is to compare the applicability of PTW (Powered Two-Wheeled) active safety systems in the US, Australia and Italy, using police-reported accident data in each region. The goal is to understand which active systems could have the greatest likelihood of reducing PTW crashes in each country.

Research question / Starting point for investigation: One of the emerging technologies in road vehicles safety is Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB), which applies autonomously a braking force to reduce impact speed in pre-crash conditions. Some studies showed that motorcycle AEB (MAEB), could be very effective and reliable in reducing serious cons...

Research question / Starting point for investigation: The application of Autonomous Emergency Braking on Motorcycles (MAEB) relies on the solution of a number of open research questions. The collision represents a dangerous and safety critical event to be avoided with high priority. However, focusing on the triggering methods, the recommendation fr...

Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking (MAEB) is a rider assistance that may soon play a role for the improved safety for Powered-Two-Wheeler users. Several studies were carried out to investigate the feasibility of automatic braking (AB) events. In a recent experiment, tests were conducted with volunteer participants to assess AB intervention und...

Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (MAEB), is a technology that introduces also on Powered-Two-Wheelers (PTWs) the autonomous braking, which is able to apply autonomously a braking force to reduce impact speed in emergency situations. This system was shown to be possibly effective in reducing numbers of deaths and serious injuries resul...

The most common evasive maneuver among motorcycle riders and one of the most complicated to perform in emergency situations is braking. Because of the inherent instability of motorcycles, motorcycle crashes are frequently caused by loss of control performing braking as an evasive maneuver. Understanding the motion conditions that lead riders to sta...

Objective: Active safety systems, of which antilock braking is a prominent example, are going to play an important role to improve powered two-wheeler (PTW) safety. This paper presents a systematic review of the scientific literature on active safety for PTWs. The aim was to list all systems under development, identify knowledge gaps and recognize...

Motorcycle rider steer responses to unexpected collision emergencies have not been studied experimentally. We used a motorcycle simulator with elastic steer mechanism and modified car driving model to simulate the input-output counter steering response of two-wheeled vehicles in combination with a car pop-up paradigm from driving studies to evaluat...

Recenti studi sulla funzione di frenata autonoma (autonomous emergency braking, AEB) per motocicli suggeriscono che il valore massimo di decelerazione automatica, inizialmente fissato a 3 m/s 2 , sia eccessivamente cautelativo, dato che in realtà anche motociclisti di media esperienza sono in grado di gestire decelerazioni di entità più elevata. Ba...

The study was dealing with to evaluate whether the motorcycle impact speed reduction produced by an ideal Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (M-AEB) is sufficient to significantly reduce the head injury severity of a helmeted rider. A set of thirteen motorcycle crashes were analysed. Multibody simulations of the victim’s kinematics were...

Objective: Motorcycles and mopeds, often referred to as powered 2-wheelers (PTWs), play an important role in personal mobility worldwide. Despite their advantages, including low cost, space occupancy, and fuel efficiency, the risk of sustaining serious or fatal injuries is higher than that for occupants of passenger cars. The development of safety...

Collisions with other vehicles represent the biggest threat to riders of powered-two-wheeler (PTW), and while emergency braking is the evasive manoeuvre most frequently required in PTW riding, many riders fail to perform it adequately due to constraints on response time precipitated by failures of perception, cognition and control actions. Effectiv...

Research question / Starting point for investigation: The improvement of motorcycle and moped riders’ safety is in the European agenda. Regrettably, the current scattered approach adopted by the industry and the academia is inefficient. The identification of a shared motorcycle safety roadmap may optimise the efforts of the stakeholders. To contrib...

Riding simulators are an important resource for motorcycle safety: they can be used to investigate human behaviour under hazardous situations, test novel assistance systems, and perform training in safe conditions. However, the level of realism of the riding simulation is crucial. In former studies, a low-cost approach to riding simulation adopting...

Tilting vehicles, such as electric bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters, are increasing in popularity as a means of personal transport. From a safety viewpoint, the development of Advanced Rider Assistance Systems (ARAS) for two-wheeled vehicles is lagging behind the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) of other road vehicles (e.g. autonomous e...

Leading causes of PTW (Powered Two-Wheeler) crashes and near misses in urban areas are on the part of a failure or delayed prediction of the changing trajectories of other vehicles. Regrettably, misperception from both car drivers and motorcycle riders results in fatal or serious consequences for riders. Intelligent vehicles could provide early war...

Artificial prediction of future location of other cars in the context of advanced safety systems is a must. The remote estimation of car pose and particularly its heading angle is key to predict its future location. Stereo vision systems allow to get the 3D information of a scene. Ground truth in this specific context is associated with referential...

Publication: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/1/295

Advanced driver assistance systems, ADAS, have shown the possibility to anticipate crash accidents and effectively assist road users in critical traffic situations. This is not the case for motorcyclists, in fact ADAS for motorcycles are still barely developed. Our aim was to study a camera-based sensor for the application of preventive safety in t...

This is a description of the conceptual foundations used for designing a novel learning environment for mechanics implemented as an Industrial Educational Laboratory – called Fisica in Moto (FiM) – at the Ducati Foundation in Bologna. In this paper, we will describe the motivation for and design of the conceptual approach to mechanics used in the l...

Collisions with other vehicles represent the biggest threat to powered-two-wheelers (PTW) riders, and while emergency braking is the evasive maneuver most frequently required in PTW riding, many riders fail to perform it adequately due to constraints on response time precipitated by failures of perception, cognition and control actions. Effective r...

Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) has been proven effective in reducing the occurrence of low speed crashes between vehicles, and more recent versions of this system are designed to intervene also in crashes involving pedestrians. The objective of the present study is to evaluate the effectiveness of AEB in reducing the injury outcomes and the avo...

Separated cycling infrastructure is a key strategy employed by urban and transport planners to reduce car vs cyclist crashes. We constructed an agent-based model (ABM) to explore the potential effects of introducing progressively greater levels of saturation (e.g., more kms) of separated cycling infrastructure into a transport network in which driv...

Research suggests that a Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (MAEB) could influence 25% of the crashes involving powered two wheelers (PTWs). By automatically slowing down a host PTW of up to 10 km/h in inevitable collision scenarios, MAEB could potentially mitigate the crash severity for the riders. The feasibility of automatic decelera...

Research suggests that a Motorcycle Autonomous Emergency Braking system (MAEB) could influence 25% of the crashes involving powered two wheelers (PTWs). By automatically slowing down a host PTW of up to 10 km/h in inevitable collision scenarios, MAEB could potentially mitigate the crash severity for the riders. The feasibility of automatic decelera...

Objective: Motorcycle riders are involved in significantly more crashes per kilometer driven than passenger car drivers. Nonetheless, the development and implementation of motorcycle safety systems lags far behind that of passenger cars. This research addresses the identification of the most effective motorcycle safety solutions in the context of...

A new research area explores the relationship between motorcycle rider muscle activation patterns and vehicle kinematics and kinetics to understand the interaction between human control inputs and vehicle kinematic outcome. A common factor in serious motorcycle accidents is the absence or inadequacy of braking by the rider to avoid collision. This...

Objective Laboratory studies have demonstrated that impact protectors (IP) used in motorcycle clothing can reduce fracture severities. While crash studies have reported IP are associated with reduced likelihood of soft tissue injury, there is little evidence of their effectiveness in reducing fracture likelihood. This discrepancy might be related t...

This paper aims to investigate rider braking behaviors using a dataset of braking maneuvers derived from naturalistic riding data. Each braking event was fully characterized with experimental data. A set of descriptive parameters was defined to capture relevant information of the braking event and to facilitate the clustering process of braking beh...

Objective: Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) is a safety system that detects imminent forward collisions and reacts by slowing down the host vehicle without any action from the driver. AEB effectiveness in avoiding and mitigating real-world crashes has recently been demonstrated. Research suggests that a translation of AEB to powered 2-wheelers co...

The safety in numbers (SiN) effect is often invoked as a mechanism by which increasing numbers of vulnerable road users introduced into a transport network can result in reduced per-capita risk of collision resulting in injury or death. Mechanisms underlying SiN’s function, however, have not been well described. Extending previous agent-based model...

The aim of study is to find the most dangerous scenarios of PTW accidents. Those configurations will be analysed in the virtual environment. The way to find which real world scenarios are most hazardous will be statistical analysis of European road accident databases.

Current knowledge on safety technologies developed for passenger cars represents great potential for translatable solutions that may also reduce the number and the severity of casualties among motorcyclists. However, the translation of a safety system conceived for a four-wheeled vehicle to a motorcycle is not straightforward due to the different c...

Research question Autonomous emergency braking (AEB) has been indicated as a potential safety application not just for passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles, but also for motorcycles and powered two-wheelers (PTWs) at large. Motorcycle AEB (MAEB) was designed to produce autonomous deceleration of a host PTW in case of inevitable collision. Previo...

Powered Two Wheeler (PTW) is an efficient transport system valuable especially in cities. The growth of PTW riders in the last decade has been linked by an overall increase in accidents, where in most cases the main contributing factor is human related. Current training, more focused on preparing the license test than in safety training skills, is...

Motorcycle autonomous emergency braking (MAEB) was recently identified as a promising safety solution, the applicability of which was estimated to be one third of all motorcycle crashes. Further evaluations are needed to clarify the potential benefits of MAEB in real world crashes. In this paper, a new method is presented. The method involves first...

Powered Two Wheeler (PTW) accidents and rider fatalities demand in-depth understanding of causative factors. The aim of this research is to investigate in-depth PTW-car accidents, where human errors were the sole causative factors and not influenced by any environmental or vehicle factor, whereby the true potential of rider and driver assistance sy...

Objective: Increasing levels of active transport provide benefits in relation to chronic disease and emissions reduction but may be associated with an increased risk of road trauma. The safety in numbers (SiN) effect is often regarded as a solution to this issue; however, the mechanisms underlying its influence are largely unknown. We aimed to (1)...

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility and quantitative potential benefits of a motorcycle autonomous emergency braking (MAEB) system in fatal rear-end crashes. A further aim was to identify possible criticalities of this safety system in the field of powered 2-wheelers (PTWs; e.g., any additional risk introduced by the sys...

Powered two wheelers (PTWs) are becoming increasingly popular in Europe but the risk of rider injury in a traffic crash far exceeds that for car occupants. The European Powered Two wheeler Integrated Safety project (PISa), identified autonomous emergency braking (MAEB) as a priority area for reducing the injury consequences of PTW crashes. This stu...