Abstract
Personal Transporter such as Segway is expected as a new individual regional transport mode. It has already started to use in private road and area in Japan as well, but not public street and road because of its safety issue. Therefore it is required to evaluate the impact of PTs on the safety in the situation that PTs and other transportation mode are mixed. However, there is no data and method to evaluate the safety in case Personal Transporter is introduced on the road due to the lack of the knowledge about the running characteristics of such vehicles. This paper therefore analyzes fundamental characteristics of Segway's running behavior through the test course experiment, in particular, considering the difference in the experience of using Segway. Trajectory data of Segway was collected for 14 male subjects, and running situation were assumed to be five running scenes which are acceleration, deceleration, rotating by slalom running, overtaking and passing with pedestrian and urgent stopping. Though the experiment results focusing on the experiments level of Segway riding, there is difference tendency between beginners and experiencer that deceleration and rotating behavior since experiencer could smoothly decrease and small variance of rotating angle of traverse during their slalom test. On the other hand, beginners tends to make jerky movements when they need to achieve a balance safely stands on Segway. For the urgent stopping, the experiments shows there is not much difference by the experience, but it indicated similarity of Segway with stopping behavior of Bicycle. These results are expected to be useful information for designing Segway training scheme and evaluating Segway running road and its rule using microscopic traffic simulation.
