“Ari, the green-light eBike” is a novel eBike that helps you catch a “green wave”, i.e. to cross any intersection when the lights are green. Ari includes a custom-built mobile phone app, building on the fact that many cyclists already use apps to plan routes and track location and speed. If we now also use traffic light data, as made available by Smart City infrastructure, we can determine where the rider is and if the next lights are going to be red or green when the rider continues at his/her given speed. If the rider is about to miss a green light, our system talks wirelessly via Bluetooth to the eBike’s engine to subtly increase the power so that the rider crosses the traffic light on green, allowing him/her to cruise through the city on a “green wave”.

Interviews suggested that participants very much liked riding with our system. They compared it to riding a horse due to integration of both the user’s and animal’s skills that allowed them to successfully work together – the rider was responsible for most of the pedalling and steering through traffic, while the eBike was responsible for monitoring the speed and providing engine support. Together, they were able to cross the traffic lights on green.

We believe that the insights resulting from designing and studying our novel system can offer valuable guidance to designers and researchers of future human-system integration systems.

See also our other eBike work: Ava, the eBike and Ena, the EEG-eBike.

Publications

Andres., J., Kari, T., von Kaenel, J., Mueller, F. ‘Co-riding With My eBike to Get Green Lights’. DIS 2019. Long paper. ACM. 1251-1263. VideoTalk video.

DIS 2019 talk

Acknowledgements

We thank our collaborators from IBM Research and the University of Melbourne, especially Yuyang (Eric) Zhang.

Media

“Meet Ari, the smart bike that helps you catch green lights”. IBM. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2019/10/smart-bike/