Rider trunk and bicycle pose estimation with fusion of force/inertial sensors

Estimation of human pose in physical human-machine interactions such as bicycling is challenging because of highly-dimensional human motion and lack of inexpensive, effective motion sensors. In this paper, we present a computational scheme to estimate both the rider trunk pose and the bicycle roll angle using only inertial and force sensors. The estimation scheme is built on a rider-bicycle dynamic model and the fusion of the wearable inertial sensors and the bicycle force sensors. We take advantages of the attractive properties of the robust force measurements and the motion-sensitive inertial measurements. The rider-bicycle dynamic model provides the underlying relationship between the force and the inertial measurements. The extended Kalman filter-based sensor fusion design fully incorporates the dynamic effects of the force measurements. The performance of the estimation scheme is demonstrated through extensive indoor and outdoor riding experiments.