OpenBikeSim
While flight and driving simulators have long benefited from shared construction standards and methodological guidelines, bicycling simulators still lack a common framework. Expertise sits isolated in individual research groups, making studies hard to compare and every new build a fresh start. OpenBikeSim, a project of the Chair of Bicycle Traffic at the University of Wuppertal, was created to close that gap: an online portal that gathers the state of the art in one place and connects the people developing and applying bicycling simulators.
At its center is a systematic framework for simulator technology, derived from a review of 108 published simulator setups. It breaks a simulator down into its functional subsystems: the physical ones the rider interacts with, such as steering, braking, pedaling resistance, motion and vibration, and the virtual ones that generate bicycle dynamics, the environment, and surrounding traffic. The framework supports comparable reporting of the technologies used in bicycle simulators, and it gives researchers a place to host and showcase their own open-source subsystems and designs.
The framework is paired with things you can use straight away. The chair has published the full documentation of its own TiptoP simulator, covering hardware, firmware and software down to the practical detail needed to rebuild or adapt it. It comes with reusable modules: a steering angle sensor, a hand brake, a speed sensor, and step-by-step guides for setting up CARLA as a virtual environment. Two TiptoP maps form the first entries in the OpenBikeSim Maps Library, a registry of open virtual environments: a 3D map of the University of Wuppertal's hilly Grifflenberg campus and "Stairstepper," an artificial route whose gradient rises stepwise from 0% to 13%. All of it is published under open licenses, so you are free to download it, build on it, and take it in your own direction.
The project ran from September 2024 to February 2026, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space under the DATIpilot program (grant 03DPS124). The portal is designed to keep growing with its community. If you have developed simulator hardware, a virtual environment, or an experiment design method, we would be glad to add it, whether it is already published in a repository or still waiting for a good home. Send a short description, a link if you have one, and the license to radverkehr@uni-wuppertal.de.
Explore OpenBikeSim at openbikesim.uni-wuppertal.de.
