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askapro Diffi culties with motorcycle simulators By Lee Parks #162125


A: Motorcycle simulators have been tried in various forms and levels of sophistication for decades. Strangely, it is more difficult to create a realistic full-motion motorcycle simulator then automotive or even a flying simulator. In order to account for changes in


Q: I have noticed that simulators are used extensively in aviation and other industries for train- ing. Why don’t they get used for motor- cycle training?


tained, controlled environment. Quite a few years ago I spoke to a chassis


speed, pitch, yaw and rolling, a fixed- wing flight simulator has to be pro- grammed to deal primarily with: 1) Aerodynamic forces (including drag)


2) The normal force (gravity) 3) Inertial forces (on aircraft and pilot)


4) Thrust from the engine (and possibly the cooling system)


By contrast a motorcycle deals with


all the above forces plus: 1) Gyroscopic precession 2) Rider/passenger body position and movement (changes in com- bined center of gravity)


3) Changes of friction from the road surface


4) Tire profile shape 5) Braking system 6) Suspension position and rate of change


The incredibly sophisticated inter-


play of all these forces with a known motorcycle design has left even the most sophisticated of motorcycle engineers scratching their heads with how to recreate them in a small, con-


98 BMW OWNERS NEWS September 2016


designer at Honda Motor Corporation and asked him your same question. His response was quite telling. He said Honda had spent around $10 million trying to develop a sim- ulator and gave up when, “We were no closer to making a realistic simulator than when we started.” The good news is that part of that experiment was salvaged in the form of the Honda Smart Trainer. The Smart Trainer is not a simulator in the tra- ditional sense, as the platform doesn’t roll, pitch or move in any way—and the steering only works as direct steering, not counter- steering. However, it does do an admirable job of creating traffic scenarios to test a rider’s decision making ability about nego- tiating traffic safely. In my experience, moving simulators can


be very useful for body position training, but none have been able to accurately


simulate the effects of steering as of this writing. The most sophisticated version I’ve personally seen and used (Figure 1) has been tried in the armed forces without much success. While it does a decent job simulating accelerating, braking and shift- ing, its steering process is not even remotely accurate. The way it tries to deal with the cornuco-


pia of forces is to steer directly up to 12 mph; then a bell rings and steering operates in the opposite way. At that point only countersteering will cause the bike to start or keep leaning in a turn. The problem with that strategy is a real bike will crash if you continue to countersteer the bars once it enters a turn. Countersteering is only for getting a bike to begin rolling by temporar- ily causing it to fall. Fortunately, the reason we don’t fall is the trail in the chassis then forces the wheel into the direction of the turn to keep it balanced. This is why all the


Figure 1.


skills


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