Project

Powered two-wheelers (PTWs) account for a disproportionate share of serious injuries and fatalities in road traffic despite being a small part of total traffic yet remain underrepresented in structured traffic safety research frameworks, including Vision Zero.  

As autonomous vehicles and ADAS-equipped cars become more common, understanding how PTW operators perceive and respond to complex traffic scenarios is becoming increasingly important. Simulation offers a safe, controlled and repeatable way to study this.  

European research groups, notably WIVW in Würzburg with the DESMORI motorcycle riding simulator, have demonstrated the value of rider-in-the-loop simulation for PTW human factors research. However, rider-in-the-loop setups in research use are typically custom integrations built around specific hardware, and turnkey solutions are rare. Whether any available platform combines PTW vehicle dynamics, immersive visualization and scenario authoring with open interfaces to third-party simulator hardware is a central question this pre-study will answer. No rider-in-the-loop simulation capability for PTWs exists within the Swedish research community or the SAFER ecosystem.  
This pre-study aims to establish the foundation for such a capability.  

The project will conduct a structured evaluation of available PTW vehicle dynamics software, assessing candidates against criteria including simulation fidelity, hardware interface capability and suitability for human factors research. In parallel, open-source tools will be explored as a potential low-cost prototyping environment for hardware integration and scenario development. In collaboration with SMC (Sveriges Motorcyklister) and Chalmers Vehicle Dynamics, requirements for the simulation environment will be defined from an operator perspective, along with a prioritized list of safety-relevant traffic scenarios suitable for a full-scale study. 

Expected outcomes 

The expected outcomes are a justified software selection with an integration plan, an assessment of open-source tools as a prototyping environment, a defined set of simulation requirements and prioritized scenarios, and a basis for a subsequent full research project.  

Contributors 

The project brings together motoTec Labs as coordinator, contributing simulator hardware and PTW dynamics expertise, SMC contributing user-centered expertise based on extensive engagement with riders, practical riding experience and long-standing work in PTW safety, enabling the identification of realistic and safety-critical scenarios, and Chalmers contributing methodological expertise from previous simulator studies. 

Traffic Safety Benefit 

This pre-study explores the conditions required to enable rider-in-the-loop simulation of PTW operator behavior within the SAFER ecosystem. The motoTec Labs motorcycle simulator, with motion platform, force feedback handlebars, wind, haptics and VR, is available to the project as a hardware platform for evaluating candidate solutions and can be made accessible for future SAFER research if the foundation is established. A central part of the work is identifying which safety-critical scenarios would benefit most from simulation-based study, and mapping which available software solutions could realistically support them. 

Longer term, the goal is to generate knowledge about how future transport systems and automated vehicles interact with PTW operators, ensuring that PTW users are included in the safety transition and contributing to the continued development of Vision Zero as a framework that includes all road users.