Behind closed doors, BMW has been working on autonomous motorcycle technology for the last couple of years.
This week BMW Motorrad released a short video showcasing a BMW motorcycle cruising around a test track with no driver, starting from a stop, leaning into turns, and braking all by itself..
Motorcycle riders die at a rate 28 times higher than that of people behind the wheel of a car. It’s safe to say, then, that motorcycles theoretically stand to benefit from the recent boom in the development of driver assistance technology. There are unique challenges, to be sure, but the application looks more possible than ever.
The bike starts, stops, turns on a lean and brakes all by itself. Self-driving technology has advanced at a rapid pace in the last few years and its introduction to motorcycles could mean a much safer ride.
BMW says it has no interest in creating a riderless bike for the sake of it; the team is using this test platform to understand motorcycle riding dynamics better, so it can explore what kind of active safety measures might make sense on future bikes.
The technology was developed by graduate engineer Stefan Hans and his team. "The prototype," says Stefan Hans, "helps us to expand our knowledge about the vehicle's dynamics, so that we can classify the rider's behaviour, and determine if a future situation will become dangerous or not. If so, we can inform, warn, or intervene directly.
Certainly, the car world has benefited greatly from systems like automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist, and all manner of clever blind spot and cross traffic alert systems. But many bikers consider themselves a different breed, more tuned in to what's happening on the road as a matter of necessity and survival.
Translating these kinds of driver assistance features to a motorcycle will certainly be a challenge. You can program a car to slam on the brakes to avoid a crash, and the driver will (likely) come out just fine. But if you do that on a motorcycle, the rider would go flying off the bike. Given the level of control motorcycle riders have over the balance of their bikes, even subtle automated corrections could create new danger.
It'll be interesting to see what kinds of rider assist technology emerge from this autonomous BMW program.