Louis Peck is a Registered Professional Mechanical Engineer and the owner of Axiom Forensic and Lightpoint Scientific. He is a retired motorcycle racer who specializes in motorcycle collision reconstruction and teaches reconstruction and analysis of motorcycle crashes as well as photogrammetry classes to other experts. He has published numerous papers on things such as sliding friction, stopping behavior of motorcycle drivers, influence of riding experience, pole impact analysis, and much more. Join us as we discuss current technology, practical issues and what makes motorcycle collision reconstruction unique from other types of vehicles.
Originally aired on : February 9, 2023
Louis Peck is a Registered Professional Mechanical Engineer and the owner of Axiom Forensic and Lightpoint Scientific. He is a retired motorcycle racer who specializes in motorcycle collision reconstruction and teaches reconstruction and analysis of motorcycle crashes as well as photogrammetry classes to other experts. He has published numerous papers on things such as sliding friction, stopping behavior of motorcycle drivers, influence of riding experience, pole impact analysis, and much more. Join us as we discuss current technology, practical issues and what makes motorcycle collision reconstruction unique from other types of vehicles.
Originally aired on : February 9, 2023
00;00;30;05 - 00;00;49;28
Eugene
Hi Everybody, it’s Eugene here and welcome to Forensics Talks. This is episode 78. And my guest today is Louis Peck. And we're going to be talking about motorcycle collision reconstruction. So let's talk about Louis Peck and I'm really pleased that he's here. I guess, geez, I've known Louis for years now. I remember a conversation with him on the phone.
00;00;49;29 - 00;01;09;05
Eugene
God, it's got to be. Oh, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if it was close to ten years ago, you know, talking about photogrammetry and all kinds of interesting stuff. So I've always appreciated his input and his professionalism and how deep he likes to get into a lot of these subjects. He's a registered professional mechanical engineer and the owner of Axiom Forensic and Light Point Scientific.
00;01;09;15 - 00;01;35;18
Eugene
He's a retired motorcycle racer who specializes in motorcycle collision reconstruction, and he teaches reconstruction and analysis of motorcycle crashes to other experts. He's directed over 50 plus crash tests. He's published numerous papers on things such as sliding friction, stopping behavior, motorcycle drivers, influence of riding experience, pull, impact analysis and a lot more. He's also going to be presenting at the upcoming REX conference.
00;01;36;04 - 00;01;41;08
Eugene
I'll ask him about that as well. So let me just bring him in here. There is. Hey, Lou, how you doing?
00;01;42;02 - 00;02;04;15
Louis
Good to be here. And, yeah, I think you're right. That was, I believe, 2013, the first time we had a chance to converse telephonically. And, man, time flies. That was right at the beginning of Lightpoint when we were getting into creating those photogrammetry exemplar models. And I think the input was it was it was a mutually beneficial discussion, that's for sure.
00;02;04;15 - 00;02;04;22
Louis
I was.
00;02;04;22 - 00;02;19;20
Eugene
Picking it. Yeah. And as I recall, we were talking about camera calibrations and different software and, and we were talking about how, you know, the results of one and the other differed and how one might have been a little bit more reporting things a little differently or something like that.
00;02;20;01 - 00;02;32;26
Louis
Yeah. That if they proved to be and I've kind of learned the importance of a of an accurate and detailed camera calibration right out of the gate there. And I've kind of taken that with me. Yeah.
00;02;33;24 - 00;02;53;26
Eugene
Well, let me ask you about your beginnings here, because one thing that I think is really interesting is the fact that, you know, you're history as a racer, a motorcycle racer. And I'm curious about when did you start with all that and how, you know, how did you migrate into the mechanical engineering and getting into that, the whole reconstruction aspects?
00;02;54;12 - 00;03;18;09
Louis
Yeah. So I grew up in Massachusetts and my dad is well, he's retired now but was a medical doctor. So growing up. I always wanted motorcycles, dirt bikes, street bikes, all of that. But my father was not on board and I didn't have enough money at that point to buy my own motorcycle. So that was that. In college I went to school.
00;03;18;09 - 00;03;38;24
Louis
Undergrad was mechanical engineering and I did two internships. That man, in retrospect, they paid really well. I think I was getting paid like $20 an hour in 2003, and it was a full they were full time internships. So I had finally accumulated enough money to buy my own motorcycle. And it was kind of one of the first things I did.
00;03;39;08 - 00;04;10;10
Louis
Bought a 1999 CBR 600 f4. Probably not the best starter bike. In retrospect, I've got about 100 horsepower, but I only crashed it on the track, never on the street, so it ended up working out okay. And that was really almost simultaneous to me being introduced to the concept of collision reconstruction. I think, as I'm sure you've heard a lot of people say, and it might be true for you as well, it was never a discipline that I was aware of.
00;04;12;01 - 00;04;35;27
Louis
I mean, it makes sense. There must be people out there doing what we do collision reconstruction. But it wasn't something on my radar. I was an undergrad, mechanical engineering and my thermodynamics professor was a young guy and seemed to understand the importance of warming up the class with some cool stories. And he was really a full time forensic engineer and then a part time teacher.
00;04;36;06 - 00;05;05;11
Louis
So, he'd come in and talk about cases he was working on tank explosions, shootings, car crashes. He was a generalist, and it sparked my interest. And when the class was over, I rang him up and just asked, Can I come to an internship and see what this is all about? And he was really encouraging, right out of the gate to say, Hey, look for the gaps in the literature and pick something that you want to do because it's such a broad field.
00;05;05;28 - 00;05;29;19
Louis
And at that point I had just started writing motorcycles pretty seriously. I took that. CBR And this is kind of at the advent of track days as well, where you could take your own motorcycle head to the track, ride as fast as you want to ride. Don't have to worry about sand on the road. You don't have to worry about police or left turning cars, which, as we'll get into, is everything that riders have to worry about on the street.
00;05;30;01 - 00;05;49;29
Louis
And I just kind of developed on that bike. I developed over the years on the track and I was never very competitive with anybody but myself. It was kind of like me against the track. Can I pick up a half a second on the next lap? And then that eventually turns into, you know, can I pick up a 10th of a second in your smiling ear to ear if you can do that?
00;05;51;08 - 00;06;12;13
Louis
But for whatever reason, one day. So, I bought my a crash bike, a Suzuki XB 650. So, somebody just pulled out in front of this guy. He laid it down and he was selling it for like $900. I remember like a winter day in Boston, just heading down into this alley and buying this bike for like 900 bucks.
00;06;12;24 - 00;06;29;20
Louis
And I just tore off all the pieces, everything. It was like a frame and an engine when I was done, and I just built it up from there with the goal of making just a really bad ass track bike. And as a mechanical engineer and a rider that just that suited me. It seemed like a really fun thing to do.
00;06;29;20 - 00;06;48;06
Louis
And I had a blast doing it. But after a year of riding that on the track, one of the track day instructors came up to me. He said, hey, you know, you're fast enough to be on the podium in the amateur class. I was like, really? Is like, Yeah, you be like second or third most time. And I was like, Okay, well, maybe that maybe it'll be fun to do that.
00;06;48;06 - 00;07;28;29
Louis
It'll push me a little bit harder, make me learn more. And I always loved the relationship between there's really, really three things is like the relationship between the rider, the bike and then the analytics of the data. This is at this point I guess we're talking like 2010 or 11. They were coming out with data acquisition systems that you could just put on your bike that were based so very easy to put on and you're getting like ten hertz position data and therefore speed data and I loved just looking at that data, comparing it to other riders, trying to get faster.
00;07;29;08 - 00;07;49;15
Louis
And I continued to do that and was eventually bumped to the expert level. And shortly after bumping to the expert level, a couple things happened that took me out of the game. So now I just ride on the track. Number one, I found out that my wife was pregnant with triplets and that is going to change the game for most people.
00;07;49;22 - 00;08;16;06
Louis
First of all, I was not wealthy at the time, so I could not afford that many diapers and tires. And then secondly, obviously, just as is not the safest sport in the world. So knowing that that's going to be a dad to two boys and a girl, I was I was planning on retiring that year anyway. But my father, who's a medical doctor, never wanted me to ride my wife, who's currently pregnant with triplets.
00;08;16;06 - 00;08;40;18
Louis
My older brother, who was always very protective of me. They come to watch me race this June in 2012, and I get into a pretty gnarly crash. It's on video, so if you ever take my motorcycle class, you'll see me present the data and the video. But I'm kind of upright and somebody tries to pass me on the right and clips me while they're passing me.
00;08;40;18 - 00;09;08;19
Louis
And so, I go down lost consciousness for a little bit, ambulance ride the whole the whole kit and caboodle. But I'd really say the calmest person in that whole situation was my wife. It was really my dad and my brother that most concerned, but no major injuries, collarbone, concussion, things like that. But as far as I could tell, my brain's working just as well now as it did then, as you can probably tell by how many words a minute I'm spewing right now.
00;09;08;19 - 00;09;22;23
Eugene
That's awesome. And then so was it that was it at that time you said, okay, look, I need to start focusing more on the reconstruction stuff, getting into doing this like, so what was the switch to starting a business?
00;09;23;05 - 00;09;46;12
Louis
Yeah, so it was simultaneous as far as developing my career with the goal of, you know, when you start out, obviously you can't just take motorcycle cases. So, when I started my career, I was doing everything, but I always had my eye on if I really want to be good at something. I don't have the personal bandwidth, the personal intelligence to be good at seven disciplines.
00;09;46;22 - 00;10;13;12
Louis
I know that's not what I'm capable of. So it was always my goal to specialize in motorcycle collision reconstruction. And I was already doing motorcycle sorry collision reconstruction in general while I was racing with a hope of taking some of that information and taking some of that expertise, taking some data, I was simultaneously doing research with the help of other racers who are consistently crashing and had GPS devices on their bikes.
00;10;14;15 - 00;10;44;22
Louis
And then in about 2014 is the kids are born at that point. My wife's family is on the West Coast and we kind of agreed, Well, we get some familial support out there for the kids and if I can move out to the West Coast, I could probably start tailoring my career toward motorcycle only because obviously on the East Coast, as you know, in Toronto, there's not in 12 months of riding out there.
00;10;44;23 - 00;11;27;03
Louis
But if I move to West L.A., there's 12 months of riding, there's a lot of yahoos and I am one of them at times. But so, I can probably continue down the motorcycle path and hopefully just do motorcycle recon eventually. And Axiom was a bit of flipping that switch. I was working with Eric Dial out of Culver City, who is an amazing reconstructionist, and I learned so much working with him for I think I worked with him for about four years and picked up a lot of the West Coast culture from Eric, which is in the recon world.
00;11;28;03 - 00;11;55;17
Louis
I love the West Coast culture. It's amazing. They really big budgets, really deep analyzes and the litigation is pretty fierce. So, you have to be buttoned up come deposition. You're going to be up against good attorneys, you're going to be up against other really good reconstructionists with big budgets. You know, I really wasn't used to the heat, to the big I'm going to call a huge I mean, from what I came from there, huge budgets compared to what was happening in the Northeast at the time.
00;11;56;08 - 00;12;21;16
Louis
And at least in my practice, so hooked up with Eric. And then in 2018 I was like, you know what? I'm going to make this push to be motorcycle only. I want to get out of the city a little bit to raise my family in the suburbs, give them a bigger backyard, more mountains. And so I moved out to Thousand Oaks offices in Westlake Village, which is kind of part and parcel of Thousand Oaks.
00;12;22;05 - 00;12;44;11
Louis
And then I really flipped the switch, I'd say for like two years ago is when I really tried not to take anything but motorcycle cases. And I think probably within the last year I can fairly convincingly say it's only motorcycles. I have a few clients that have a soft place, I have a soft place in my heart for them.
00;12;44;11 - 00;13;14;13
Louis
So if they call, I might deviate from motorcycle collision reconstruction for them. But everything else is straight. Motorcycle recon and it's allowed me to become better and better at that, to evolve, to learn. And I am also what happens with that is you're really only not only, but the vast majority of times you're called on relatively difficult cases, challenging cases, and you're also up against fantastic motorcycle experts.
00;13;14;25 - 00;13;27;23
Louis
So it just helps you grow. It's this nice pressure chamber where you're exposed to good analysis. You have to do perform really good analysis and it helps you continue to evolve.
00;13;28;12 - 00;13;51;13
Eugene
Let me ask you about the shift from four wheels to two wheels, right? So, besides the obvious that, you know, where we were pulling away a couple of sets of wheels, what kinds of things make the motorcycle unique? And those types of incidents unique with respect to, you know, for real car truck type of incidents. Yeah.
00;13;51;13 - 00;14;11;25
Louis
So there's a whole bunch of things from the reconstruction perspective that changes once you go to the to the two wheels. One, there's a if you look at a motorcycle, read the dynamics books, there's 11 degrees of freedom on a motorcycle. So, there is a lot to consider. And I find myself at times getting forward, thinking.
00;14;11;25 - 00;14;33;16
Louis
I know the orientation of the motorcycle during this position in the sequence, but it's an articulated vehicle. The rear can swing around the steering stem. It can lean substantially one way or the other. You know, let's just call it plus or -45 degrees. It can pitch. Not a lot of cars doing wheelies or end those on the way into an impact.
00;14;33;16 - 00;15;00;05
Louis
But with a motorcycle, you have to consider that like, hey, it's the motorcycle is the rear tire off the ground in the motorcycle yard. 45 degrees while also potentially rolled or something like that. So there's a whole new challenge there associated with interpreting tire marks, interpreting roadway evidence, interpreting vehicle damage to hopefully be able to arrive at what what's actually happens dynamically with the motorcycle.
00;15;00;05 - 00;15;22;25
Louis
And then, you know, obviously, one of our big challenges in collision reconstruction in general is to determine the speed at the vehicles in involved in the crash, the speeds of the vehicles. So, one of the key tools there is conservation of momentum. But for the most part, that is going to be it's not going to be applicable in a motorcycle crash.
00;15;22;25 - 00;15;46;16
Louis
Sometimes it is if the motorcycle brings enough momentum to the game and moves the target vehicle enough, then you can use momentum. But one of the best tools we have, momentum is not available to us in collision reconstruction when it relates to a motorcycle. If you have a £800 motorcycle striking a £5,000 pickup truck, the odds of being able to use momentum are small.
00;15;46;16 - 00;16;18;24
Louis
It's going to be overly sensitive to the point where it's useless. So, we have to come up with other methodologies. And fortunately, there is there's there are many methods out there nowadays. As you know, the vast majority of vehicles have black boxes on board. So if the motorcycle hits the car and the impact is substantial enough to trigger an event, then we can perform simulation analyzes to figure out how fast the motorcycle must have been going at impact or approximately to generate that collision pulse.
00;16;19;12 - 00;16;41;02
Louis
So that's been really helpful. You know, in a car crash, you have really two shots. It EDR data, you have the target vehicle, the bullet vehicle. But in most motorcycle crashes, that's not the case. The motorcycle is not going to be equipped with a black box. It's really just 2013 plus Kawasaki's essentially that have black boxes. So you're going to be kind of cut off there 50% of the time.
00;16;42;11 - 00;17;04;22
Louis
And then there's some other interesting things like rider skill that that plays a huge role. So, for instance, you know, a lot of the times the cases we get now are on video, so we get to quantify the rider's braking ability on their way in and sometimes you'll see point for G's and others. Other times you'll see one guy and they're just skimming the rear tire over the ground.
00;17;04;22 - 00;17;29;14
Louis
It's picked up a little bit and they maximize braking and they're heading into impact. So, when you do your math, if there's 80 feet of braking pre impact and one person's braking at 0.4 G's and another is braking at one G, that that makes a huge difference. So if we don't have it on video, we don't have motorcycle EDR data or how do we quantify that braking rate.
00;17;30;05 - 00;17;59;26
Louis
So that same skill comes into effect with single vehicle crashes and the rider's tolerance for lean angle, where somebody like if you put me on a sport bike, I'm okay leading at 40 degrees, but the average rider's really going to start to get freaked out around 15 or 20 degrees. So, if you find out that at this speed and this radius turn, they're leaned over at 25 degrees and they went off the road, it's like, okay, well, that kind of kind of makes sense considering their background.
00;18;00;19 - 00;18;22;09
Louis
Granted, you have to know their background. And I think that's something the experts should work with. The attorneys with so that they can get that information at deposition and figure out what their background is. You can also look at tires and things like that and see there's a term we have a lot of people probably had a chicken strips, which is the strip on the edge of the tire that has never been ridden on.
00;18;22;24 - 00;18;42;23
Louis
And that's it's normal if you're if you're behaving on the roadway. There should be a chicken strip. Really, the only place, in my opinion, to get rid of the chicken strip is on the track because the chicken strip is essentially going to stick there until the hour, 40 degrees for areas of the lean angle five. So there and then they fall over all the time, motorcycles.
00;18;42;23 - 00;19;02;29
Louis
So every motorcycle case at Nathan Rose, I think wrote this in one post and I loved it is essentially every motorcycle case becomes a rollover at some point I can probably count on two hands how many times I've had a motorcycle crash where the motorcycle is not on the ground on its side at the end, and sometimes it hits both sides and tumbles.
00;19;02;29 - 00;19;13;19
Louis
So that makes the inspections more complex. It makes the analysis more complex. So there's a lot to consider in motorcycle crashes that is unique.
00;19;14;08 - 00;19;35;25
Eugene
Let me ask you about the bikes themselves, because obviously there's been a big change over the years between the tech type kind of technology and stuff. So obviously, you mentioned the riders that was riders past whatever, ten years or something like that. But what other have there been any other technological sort of implementations into, you know, modern day motorcycles, which have really changed the things?
00;19;35;25 - 00;19;40;17
Eugene
Or maybe there's a trend that you're seeing with respect to certain features of bike design?
00;19;41;01 - 00;20;14;17
Louis
Yeah, I'd say the most important in my is ABS, just anti-lock braking systems. It's crazy. So, the general rule of thumb is that the motorcycle industry is about a decade behind the automotive industry with respect to the technology. But with ABS, I'd say it's like 20 or 30 years behind. So they the percentage of models now that are being released with ABS standard and optional is finally on this like exponential hockey stick rise.
00;20;14;17 - 00;20;46;26
Louis
And in Europe, in Australia they've really mandated that motorcycles be equipped with abs. There's classes of motorcycles that have to have it, but for the most part, practically it's all bikes that have to have abs in Europe. That's not true in the States. And there's been kind of this machismo associated with riding a motorcycle without abs, because theoretically, if you're one of the best riders in the world, you can do a better job of braking on a bike that doesn't have abs than you can with abs.
00;20;47;17 - 00;21;16;17
Louis
I will just tell you I'm personally not good enough to outbreak abs and on that bike that you can see behind me, that's my personal Yamaha that has abs and I can still get the rear tire off the ground. If you're braking in a controlled, deliberate manner, then you don't you won't activate the ABS. It's only when you squeeze it so hard in so quickly that the front tire starts to start to slip and then ABS is going to help you out.
00;21;17;00 - 00;21;38;09
Louis
So I'm a huge proponent of ABS on motorcycles. The IHS has done some studies in showing the frequency of fatalities and the frequency of just collision occurrences in general is reduced really substantially for riders that have bikes with ABS. Who knows if that's causation or correlation? You know, probably a bit more of a sophisticated rider that's choosing a bike with abs.
00;21;38;09 - 00;22;01;08
Louis
But so now that affects the analysis because we don't get tire marks a lot of the time. So, one of our big tools is, okay, we see a tire mark on the roadway. One of the challenges of motorcycle collision reconstruction for sure is establishing what tire made that mark and then what the brake braking behavior of the rider was during the generation of that tire mark.
00;22;01;08 - 00;22;28;22
Louis
In other words, did they use the front as well? Did they use the rear? What was their independent braking systems? For the most part, unlike a car. So that affects the braking rate that you are going to assign as well. But then it helps us, of course, figure out where the rider was on the roadway and when. And we've recently just published a paper in 2023, I think it'll be available for purchase and download from SAIC in the next couple of weeks.
00;22;30;00 - 00;22;54;04
Louis
Looking at. All right, we took three motorcycles, different tire compounds. One was a touring compound, one was a sport touring, and then one was a track de tire, three different motorcycles, three different roadway services, three different riders, and then braked as quickly and as hard as we could to ensure that we're activating ABS and then looked at what do we get for evidence on the roadway, What do we get for evidence on the tire?
00;22;54;17 - 00;23;25;12
Louis
And almost universally there was no evidence on the roadway. Sometimes you will get evidence on the roadway, but you can't count on it anymore. The real spot that is helping us determine if the rider braked and how is to look at the tires themselves. So while the motorcycle is still on the ground at the crash site, optimally a crash scene, I should say, if you take a detailed look at the tires, you will see patterns that are consistent with aggressive braking.
00;23;25;21 - 00;23;43;00
Louis
And if that's picked up and roll through some dirt and put on a transport truck and then dropped off at a tow yard somewhere, it's generally going to be gone. So I'm trying to encourage investigators in the classes that I teach in the books. I just wrote the chapter for Northwestern and I made a point to put it in there.
00;23;43;11 - 00;24;03;25
Louis
And then this essay paper, I really want to encourage first responders to look at the tires and take a few minutes to look at the tire and photograph the tire so that they can assign the appropriate braking rate. Because as I was talking about earlier, it's just so important for the speed analysis which chains that changes everything.
00;24;04;08 - 00;24;11;20
Louis
You know, if you're if you're off on speed, you're off on your time distance, you're off on a lot of stuff. So you've got to get the speed right. And that's a big tool to do it.
00;24;12;14 - 00;24;31;20
Eugene
Let me ask you about training. And the reason is, you know, you're you know, a racer. So obviously your practice being you probably had some coaching, you had people that were helping you out. I did. I remember when I did my motorcycle license, actually, I really enjoyed the course. And because they gave you a different perspective, you know, it wasn't a like my driver's license, it was a motorcycle license.
00;24;31;20 - 00;24;56;29
Eugene
So they changed the frame of reference. And I thought that was great. And I thought, you know what? It'd be great, actually, for all drivers to get this kind of training, because it really gives you a different perspective when you're on the road. So, yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts on current training and current requirements for, you know, new drivers that are getting on and, you know, people that maybe are picking up bad habits and stuff like that where they can be more defensive or be more careful when they're on the road.
00;24;56;29 - 00;24;58;12
Eugene
Just wondering your thoughts on that.
00;24;58;20 - 00;25;21;29
Louis
Yeah, I do have some thoughts on that. I never consider myself to be as a safety specialist, but as somebody who's doing what I'm doing, obviously, I see a lot of things and I keep my finger on the pulse of the community and I know what I did and what I would do differently. And I think number one, go take professional training somewhere, whatever you need to do.
00;25;21;29 - 00;25;46;18
Louis
And in California, Lee Parks just took over with his total control program. Really sophisticated, fantastic training. It'll be it'll be interesting to see how that affects the crash rates Motorcycle Safety Foundation is obviously a good resource as well, but it's only getting you so much. You know, you spend three days there, you don't come out a skilled rider, in my opinion.
00;25;46;18 - 00;26;21;14
Louis
I remember leaving that course, getting on my Honda CBR and then trying to ride around. I was in New Hampshire at that time and just feeling underequipped. Like what? Even just turning left out of a driveway or something like that to, to merge with traffic felt a felt like I didn't have those skills quite yet. So, you know, practice is such a huge part of it and I think that it's underutilized a bit where I even still before I go out for a ride, there's a parking lot right near here.
00;26;21;14 - 00;26;39;18
Louis
I'll take a ride, I'll get my bike, I'll do some stretching and then I'll go out into the parking lot and I'll break as hard as I can. I'll get the rear tire off the off the ground and make sure that everything's working well. I'm working well. I'll do some practice U-turns, and then I'll head out. The track days, I think are really important as well.
00;26;39;18 - 00;27;04;04
Louis
If you look at the fatality statistics, it's amazing how many motorcycle fatalities are just single vehicle crashes in curves, because if it's not something you practice as, if it's not something that you're taught, you don't really you're not born with that skill. So you've got to you've got to practice it. And I'm not saying that you want to be able to go 50 and a 35 mile an hour curve for fun.
00;27;04;04 - 00;27;31;28
Louis
I'm saying if you find yourself in a position where you need to make mid-corner corrections, if you've done that and you practice that on the track hundreds of times, then you'll be able to do it without going off into a guardrail or something where the stakes are way higher. And then one of the huge things for me, I remember just I was really excited about it when I first got into riding because I had been kind of waiting for two decades to do it, reading the books that are out there.
00;27;31;28 - 00;27;58;11
Louis
And my biggest recommendation for people starting to ride is David Hough's proficient motorcycling book. And it's a lot about motorcycle dynamics. He's an engineer as well, but it's mainly about street strategies, how to survive, what things to look for on the road from other drivers, the actual roadway itself, how to get through a construction site, just a lot of really practical methodologies for surviving on the road.
00;27;59;09 - 00;28;15;28
Louis
And that's the goal. When you're out there on the road, you want to have a lot of fun, but you have to treat it with respect. And, you know, I still get a little bit nervous every time I throw a leg over the road and head out because I know what's at stake. So it's a it's a risk benefit analysis for me.
00;28;16;04 - 00;28;26;17
Louis
If I didn't get great joy doing it, I if you don't really love riding a motorcycle, don't do it. You know, it's a dangerous thing. And that's it right there. That's the book.
00;28;26;17 - 00;28;28;22
Eugene
So right on you.
00;28;29;20 - 00;28;29;27
Louis
Kind.
00;28;29;27 - 00;28;52;06
Eugene
Of. Let me ask you about the investor Asian part, right? So, you got to go out. You got to invest. You do inspections on these vehicles. Sometimes you get out to a roadway and stuff. And I want to kind of lead this and also to the like point like point scientific as well, photography, laser scanning, all that other stuff, because you use a lot of tools in your work, a lot of different things.
00;28;52;06 - 00;29;04;22
Eugene
So can you tell me, for example, well, let's start with like when scientific let let's get that out of the way because I do want to give that a little bit of treatment. What, what was your goal with low point scientific.
00;29;05;14 - 00;29;33;20
Louis
So when I first started in 2013, when you and I first hooked up, I was doing general recon at that point and any time I needed to do a crash analysis, I really loathe having to go interface with dealers and Craigslist owners and ask them if I could come measure their car. So, I was thinking, okay, well, everybody's got to have a similar pain here and not enjoy this process.
00;29;33;20 - 00;29;56;12
Louis
So if we just kind of take the hit and do it for everybody, then we can share these resources. So if I got a 2012 Honda Civic, nobody else needs to get that. It's a Lego block that everybody can plug into their system at that point. So those originally were photogrammetry based that kind of middle logo you're looking at now photogrammetry exemplars.
00;29;56;24 - 00;30;25;07
Louis
So as a relatively skeletal model of the car and over the years, as I'm sure you know, and I think you got into it probably way before I did, I started using laser scanners in 2014. They became more omnipresent just because the price was right. And I think the reconstruction community specifically saw, as others did, but with respect to my community, specifically saw the potential benefit of using these laser scanners.
00;30;25;07 - 00;30;45;14
Louis
So, they became more and more popular. And I got a couple hits of people are like, Hey, man, can you generate an exemplar database with point clouds? And I was like, I not right now. I was always too busy or didn't have the resources. And then finally in 2021, I believe we started the process of, of building an exemplar database of point clouds.
00;30;46;03 - 00;31;08;19
Louis
And now we're going to turn that into all those point clouds. We're going to turn into forensically sound meshes. And that's going to be launching in any minute, like in the next day or two. So low poly count meshes that reconstruction can use and their simulation platforms and modeling and things. So, it's really just two and we're continuing.
00;31;08;20 - 00;31;32;12
Louis
We have other products that are in the background we're working on right now that I can't mention quite yet. But really the goal is with my point is to make records easier for us and anybody in the community with also better data just elevate the analyzes and make them easier simultaneously.
00;31;32;12 - 00;31;50;11
Eugene
You have a question here and it is it goes back to something on documentation. You were talking about photographing tires and such like and I'm just gale here is a is a photographer and she's with the police over here. So, she has a question on the tire. Like when you're looking at tire damage or you're looking at tire markings and things like that, what is important to you?
00;31;50;11 - 00;31;53;05
Eugene
Or do you have any techniques or sort of a standard procedure that you use?
00;31;53;16 - 00;32;17;24
Louis
Yeah, I do. Thanks, Gail. So, I've got there's some interesting things. So, one for some visuals out there directly to that 2023 paper. If you if you search for Peck and Rubio and then there's several other authors as well. It should pop up aggressive breaking. So, there will be a lot of photographs and they're showing exactly what we're looking for.
00;32;18;22 - 00;32;37;14
Louis
But there's a couple of things. So if you have a skid mark, literally where the tire is not rotating at all, then there's going to be an abrasion patch on the tire that generated that skid. And it's going to be it's going to be pretty blatant when you're looking at the motorcycle at the crash scene. So that'll help us figure out right away.
00;32;37;14 - 00;32;59;07
Louis
Okay, was this a front or was this the rear that generated that more subtly? If the tire didn't lock and it's just rotating at some speed below the roadway speed, then you get this speckling pattern and it's like I said, much more subtle, but it is still very discernible, especially if you have been trained to look for it.
00;33;00;15 - 00;33;26;06
Louis
So if you take any of my classes, we go through those photographs. Now, fortunately, we have this essay paper that we'll show you as well. But what's happening is the tires rotating over the roadway at a speed slower than the actual roadway. That's why it's creating braking forces. So any debris that's on the roadway gets smudged across the tread and it creates what is called this the speckling pattern kind of looks like.
00;33;27;28 - 00;33;45;28
Louis
Yeah, you just took a piece of dirt. Well, lots of pieces of dirt just rubbed it across the surface of the tire. And we don't know exactly when that's generated yet. But my hunch is that really it's like 0.6 G's plus of braking. You're going to get that. So, if you just come to a normal stop at a stop sign, you won't have that.
00;33;46;10 - 00;34;16;12
Louis
But if you break if you subjected that tire specifically to two large braking forces, you will get that speckling pattern. So when I recommend is if the bikes on the ground at the crash scene do it, then you can just rotate the tire, the front tire for sure, and photograph that entire circumference. Now, with respect to the rear tire becomes a little bit more complicated because the bike is still probably in gear, and I would advise people to do the gearing analysis at that point as well.
00;34;16;23 - 00;34;37;03
Louis
That's a different topic. But motorcycles have sequential transmissions. You can click through the gears and figure out what gear they're in. There's some technique to it, but we can figure out what gear they're in. Now, once you've done that, documented that, I would advise documenting that video graphically if possible. Sometimes I lose count of how many years I've gone through in my head.
00;34;37;03 - 00;35;04;10
Louis
So if I have it on video, then I will know for sure. But if that rear tire is free to rotate through the gearing analysis, you put it in neutral. Then again, photograph the entire circumference of that tire. And if you don't know what you're looking for, it's not hard. So hopefully you can. But even if you don't know what you're looking for, if you photograph it, somebody down the line can look at it and say, okay, I see here clear evidence that the front brake was being used.
00;35;05;04 - 00;35;30;05
Eugene
Okay. Let me ask you about I mean, you go out, you do the investigation or you're collecting all this data and you could have EDR, you could have good, you know, laser scanning data, the roadway, all this stuff. How often or is your goal always to do, for example, like a computational simulation, is it to do other things?
00;35;30;05 - 00;35;36;05
Eugene
Maybe sometimes you have a lack of data that you can't, but it is your goal to always do some kind of a simulation.
00;35;36;18 - 00;35;58;27
Louis
I'd say, yeah, it's rare that I that I don't do some sort of simulation nowadays, and it's for motorcycles. It's kind of broken down into two parts. And this is one of the things that's unique for motorcycles as well. If you're dealing with collision simulation for a car, for a tractor trailer, you're typically using PC crash, virtual crash, heavy.
00;35;58;27 - 00;36;28;19
Louis
So those are kind of the three big names or M smack 3D, and those have the capability of analyzing vehicle dynamics. In addition to collision dynamics when it comes to a car, that is not the case for motorcycles. You're not going to get those programs, at least in their current state, to do a good job of modeling motorcycle dynamics, pre impact, you know, PC crash as a model where you can tell it that the motorcycle is going 35 around this curve and.
00;36;28;19 - 00;37;11;24
Louis
This is the radius and it'll calculate the lean angle, but that is far from a detailed dynamics analysis. So it's broken down in two parts for, for the way that we're analyzing things of looking at them. Part one is pre impact dynamics. What is the motorcycle doing? That can be a qualitative analysis that's coming from a firm understanding of motorcycle dynamics, or it can come from a multi body simulation platform that is designed and tailored, tweaked, I should say, over the years to be able to handle motorcycle dynamics and understand, help the analyst understand motorcycle dynamics.
00;37;11;24 - 00;37;39;20
Louis
So, we're using a platform right now called Bikes Them, and they are a very sophisticated platform that's used by most of the OEMs as well. But it takes a lot. It takes a lot to use that. That's not like a okay, let me just work on it for an hour and I'm good to go type of thing. And then the second is, like you're saying, the computational simulation platforms that are a little bit more traditional in the reconstruction world that help us understand the momentum more or less.
00;37;39;24 - 00;38;07;19
Louis
So, one of the big tools we have in our kit is if the motorcycle hits the car, the car event data recorder captures an event. We know what the Delta V was, what the acceleration profile looked like sometimes at multiple places in the car. If it's with the appropriate sensors. And then we can in simulation land, just hit the car at varying speeds for that motorcycle until we match those acceleration profiles and those delta BS.
00;38;08;08 - 00;38;30;11
Louis
And that gives us a really good approximation with respect to the motorcycle impact speed. So, I'm doing that whenever I can for sure. And then a lot of the times, the computational simulation programs just help us understand time, distance and visibility a lot better too. And then the other thing that's really awesome now is I'd say most of the cases coming in have video.
00;38;31;13 - 00;38;59;28
Louis
So we're doing in-depth photogrammetry analysis on key frames in these videos. And then once we get those positions solved for and we know the timing of each, we'll bring those positions into a computational simulation platform and then create a speed trace that makes the motorcycle hit each one of those positions. That makes sense. There's a lot of there's some variability that can even occur there once you have that.
00;38;59;28 - 00;39;12;02
Louis
But that has been invaluable. You know, just you could do it in an Excel spreadsheet, too, but it's a little bit easier to include some of the intricacies when you do it with computational simulation.
00;39;12;20 - 00;39;30;06
Eugene
Right. Earlier, you know, you talked about and so all the students out there are people that are looking to study in this area. But, you know, you talked about identifying gaps in literature. And often times, you know, people focus in on what's the answer. And I often tell people you need to focus in on the error and the uncertainty.
00;39;30;16 - 00;39;42;02
Eugene
And so I'm wondering about, you know, how important assessing or addressing uncertainty of a reconstruction, you know, is a factor for you and, you know, for other people.
00;39;42;24 - 00;40;05;20
Louis
I think, yeah, I think it's huge. And one of my favorite tools in anybody who's ever been 1 to 1 of my classes has been subjected to this torture. But one of my favorite tools is Monte Carlo analysis, and I suspect you've used that as well, and it helps you address the uncertainty with every variable and how that affects your final results.
00;40;05;20 - 00;40;25;12
Louis
So you can do very basic. Monte Carlo analyzes where this is going to get pretty technical, but I'll make it relatively quick. But say you're analyzing a crash where the motorcycle brakes for a bit goes down to the ground, slides for a bit and then hits the car. So you have three things you have to quantify there. One, what is the braking rate?
00;40;25;29 - 00;40;46;28
Louis
What is this, the deceleration when the motorcycle is sliding? And then what's the impact speed? You're not going to know any of those with certainty. You're going to have literature that helps you understand what they might be. So for each one of those, you can define a distribution. So you could say, Well, my braking rate, I have a ton of data.
00;40;47;04 - 00;41;09;11
Louis
I'd say 0.64 GS with the standard deviation of 0.13. I'm good with that sliding friction. Maybe something like point for GS with the standard deviation of .09 and then impact speed is going to be a little bit of judgment depending on what's happening. There's a lot of ways to determine impact speed by or you could do that same analysis, assuming a uniform distribution for each one of those variables.
00;41;09;22 - 00;41;39;00
Louis
So, I consider that a motorcycle collision reconstruction specifically, it's so valuable because these variables have big ranges and you don't want to be the recon that comes in and says the motorcycle was going 35.2. You want to come in? In my opinion, let me just say it this way. I want to come in being the recon that says I have 95% confidence that the motorcycle speed was 32 to 39 and I have 68% confidence that it's whatever.
00;41;39;09 - 00;42;01;18
Louis
So I like to be able to quantify that. Not everybody is philosophically aligned with that, but that's what makes me comfortable. That's how I like to show up the depot and to trial. And that that's one example of that. Another thing is when we are analyzing the motorcycles impact speed based on the crash pulse of the target vehicle, it's like there's a lot of things that you need to consider.
00;42;01;18 - 00;42;20;26
Louis
There. How much of the rider's weight plays into that momentum exchange? You know, if they don't just slam into the b-pillar and they kind of cruise over the hood, some of their weight was involved in the crash, for sure. But how much and there's been studies to kind of tease that out a little bit, but we still don't know exactly what it is for each case.
00;42;21;08 - 00;42;48;00
Louis
And then where's the accelerometer in the target vehicle? We generally will know where the black box is, the airbag control module. But where is the accelerometer within that airbag control module? Has that been considered? And Bob Scurlock wrote a paper in Collision a few years back that analyzed the how that uncertainty affects the final results in an eccentric headset can be, you know, really substantial.
00;42;48;00 - 00;43;24;15
Louis
So something we're kind of tailoring our process to try to get at now it's like it's very in-depth. Like you said at the beginning, I kind of go deep, almost to a detriment at times that I'm a very detailed analyst. And my current thought is I'd like to disassemble the car, find the airbag control module, depending on the evidentiary circumstances, dismantle the airbag control, probably not the subject airbag control module, but by an exemplar, dismantle that figure out with the accelerometer is and now in my simulation, I can place an accelerometer exactly there and be more precise.
00;43;24;18 - 00;43;36;25
Louis
It's not always necessary, but in some cases, if you find out that if you move the accelerometer two inches and it changes the impact speed of the motorcycle by ten miles an hour, then maybe it's worth pinning that down a little bit more.
00;43;37;27 - 00;43;53;20
Eugene
I want to ask you about your research. You know, since you're talking uncertainty in places where there may be areas for more studies. And I kind of went back and I mean, you've done a ton of you got a ton of publications and stuff like that. But, you know, I always like looking at people's research and how it sort of evolves over time.
00;43;53;20 - 00;44;11;29
Eugene
So, you know, there were some early papers that you did having to do with injuries and effects on ligaments and bones. And then there were some things about behavior that driver behavior. And I think there was a little bit on the photogrammetry stuff you're doing, and then there's a lot of stuff on, you know, instruments to analyzers, tire pressure and stuff like that.
00;44;12;05 - 00;44;22;15
Eugene
So I'm wondering if you can kind of walk me through sort of some of the early work you did on the rider injury. I don't know if it's that is closer to when you had your accident. Maybe it was more interesting to you back then. Yeah.
00;44;23;08 - 00;44;45;26
Louis
That was so, yeah, the way that worked, it was, it was interesting. So when I finished my undergrad, I knew I wanted to do forensics that point and there was two schools that I was really interested in. One was UC San Diego, and the other was Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. So diametrically opposed as far as climate and culture goes, you know, once like sun surfing, palm trees.
00;44;45;26 - 00;45;10;04
Louis
The other one is like winter gray snowbanks, kind of brick buildings. And I ultimately chose Worcester Polytechnic Institute, not as a knock to UC San Diego on any level. I'm sure I would have been happy there. But Worcester Polytech, I went and met with the director of the engineering program and he identified two projects that he thought he might be able to get me on.
00;45;10;20 - 00;45;31;22
Louis
One was Fluid Dynamics, which I've never had any interest any interest in. I've always tried to avoid it like the plague and then the other one, well, he did offer me that one, and he said, if you come for the first semester, I might be able to get you on this project. Semester number two, that is funded by the NHTSA analyzing human injury potential in high-speed frontal crashes.
00;45;31;26 - 00;45;50;21
Louis
And I was like, well, that's what I want to do. So I turned down both projects were fully funded. So my whole education fully funded, including like, you know, groceries and everything, one of the real benefits of engineering grad school, because a lot of the times they use the engineering students for practical purposes so they can pay them.
00;45;52;05 - 00;46;12;19
Louis
So that was awesome. So I went and I said, I'm going to take the risk. I'll pay for the first semester completely hoping that I can get on this NHTSA project for the next three semesters. That was just Master's. So was two years. And I did get on that program. The director of the program was Malcolm Ray, who's done a lot of roadside safety stuff.
00;46;13;05 - 00;46;38;22
Louis
And I got I got really lucky getting to be a part of that in my job was to understand the ligaments in the knee, thigh and hip, and when they would fail because there are viscous components. So, it's there's a strain rate effect. So, the velocity matters. The force is the, the velocity, the force that's being applied to the ligament matters.
00;46;38;22 - 00;46;58;13
Louis
So I had to develop a whole fixture and system to determine what the strain rate was on these ligaments. And then figure out ultimately when they would fail so that they could go into a finite element analysis model. And then we could develop a whole model of the knee, thigh and hip area in high-speed frontal crashes. So, I got it was great.
00;46;59;09 - 00;47;20;00
Louis
I got to study impact mechanics, I got to work with Malcolm Ray, I got to study fire dynamics. They really were able at the EPA to put together a whole program that was tailored toward forensics for me. So I came out of there, as you probably know. I'm sure you know, in the States there are no like forensic engineering programs there.
00;47;20;05 - 00;47;46;01
Louis
There maybe there is now, but back then there wasn't. I think you had there was one in Europe and I highly considered going there. But when WPI told me what they could do and have me kind of get this multidisciplinary education, working with the civil engineering, the mechanical engineering, the fire engineering department and build this forensic program for myself, I was really excited about that and that's where I got to work on that project.
00;47;46;12 - 00;48;23;27
Louis
And then I kind of went in and from there I started to get into the industry and the that, that other paper you were mentioning, the human factors, one looking at rider behavior, glance, behavior, their braking rate, their swerving capabilities. That was I was lucky enough to take Jeff Mute Arts class in 2009 and I don't think Jeff and I had met prior to that, even though we're both in the Northeast at that point, I was just, you know, a young man with no reputation, no credentials that I didn't really know anybody at that point.
00;48;23;27 - 00;48;40;10
Louis
But I showed up to his class and I saw that there was a big gap in the literature with respect to motorcycle response times. There were some studies that had been conducted just in laboratories where somebody sitting on the bike and they are exposed to a red light or a green light and they're asked to hit the brake lever as fast as they can.
00;48;40;21 - 00;49;08;23
Louis
And, you know, it's like 400 milliseconds they can do that. But that's not real world. So I went up to Jeff after the class and just said, Hey, would you be interested in performing a more in-depth analysis of motorcycle response time? And then it's, nope. First of all, Jeff was gracious enough to say yes, he must have seen something in me at that point because I, you know, I didn't like I said, I didn't have any reputation or anything like that.
00;49;09;02 - 00;49;31;04
Louis
And he had obviously a humongous reputation. He was very busy. He had a lot of things he could be spending his time on. I'm sure he's being offered all sorts of stuff by him. And I really hit it off, became friends, went really deep with that project, spent weeks and weeks and weeks of our lives prepping and then an entire week performing that research project.
00;49;31;14 - 00;49;53;13
Louis
And then that turned into like four or five publications with respect to glancing behavior of the riders. We had eye tracking devices on them so we could see what they were looking at compared to drivers and that was one of the really cool things about that study is anybody who was involved was a driver and a rider, and we track their behavior when they're in a car and then we track their behavior when they're at them, when they're riding a motorcycle.
00;49;53;23 - 00;50;23;05
Louis
So, we could spot the differences. So that was really cool. We measured braking rate as well, and they're swerving capabilities. And then from there I went more down, like you're saying, kind of the mechanical side of things, trying to develop or refine methodologies for determining the impact speed of the motorcycle based on damage and looking at sliding friction values and things like that.
00;50;24;04 - 00;50;44;14
Eugene
There's got to be some carryover. You know, one of the hot topics today is about all these electric vehicles. And actually, there's Alan Woolford. Alan and I know Lou, Lou and I both know and Alan is the developer of Photo model, a great program. But you know, he brings up the point about electric bikes, skateboards, units, the electric unit bikes or cycles and stuff like that.
00;50;44;14 - 00;50;46;02
Eugene
Are you seeing anything like that now?
00;50;46;17 - 00;51;12;27
Louis
Yeah, a bit. So there are not too many electric motorcycles on the road yet and obviously there is several companies working on it. You got Damian and then zero among others. So there and then the livewire from Harley Davidson, which apparently just spun off and is now its own brand. But I've had experience with all these bikes, but not really on the record fronts other than tangentially on the zero.
00;51;13;08 - 00;51;35;17
Louis
So we're talking about ETR a little bit. The there's only really the Kawasaki's at a bona fide ETR defining that as an event data recorder, in other words, is looking for an event and then capturing data associated with that event. That's an event data recorder. Kawasaki has that on a lot of their bikes and then Honda has it on their gold wing that has an airbag.
00;51;35;24 - 00;51;57;11
Louis
There's some gold legs that have airbags and those have an airbag control module, which then has an event data recorder. Those are rare. Those gold wings for anybody who gets a gold wing case, like if you see an airbag popped, awesome contact Honda. But it's unlikely, first of all, because people who ride Honda gold things are gentlemen and they don't speed around canyons.
00;51;58;09 - 00;52;17;22
Louis
Second of all, just because there's not that many of a made, but then you have data loggers and there are a lot of manufacturers with data loggers, which are something that can be installed aftermarket by the rider or are on the bike to begin with. And the rider just presses a button, say, Hey, I want to record this ride.
00;52;17;22 - 00;52;35;12
Louis
So that's just a little bit of background about that. But the Zero motorcycle, which is electric, has the capability of storing a lot of data, and I think it is an event data recorder. I haven't seen the data yet, but a colleague of ours out of Chicago recently reached out to zero and said, Hey, I got this crash.
00;52;36;03 - 00;52;58;03
Louis
Is there data on here? And they confirmed, yes, there is collision related data on that bike. So, I work with Harley-Davidson. Some my understanding of the livewire is it does not capture any data, even though you'd think some a motorcycle as sophisticated as any of these e-bikes, they would have that capability. It's still something the manufacturer has to decide.
00;52;58;05 - 00;53;23;07
Louis
We want to capture this data which yeah, I in speaking with Kawasaki, I think at times they wish they never created the EDR just because they get a lot of requests to help them acquire that EDR data. And I am personally very grateful that they did that because as no matter how good your recon is, you don't know what the rider was doing.
00;53;23;07 - 00;53;40;02
Louis
8 seconds pre impact unless you have event data. So, nothing. The best recon doesn't be the most sparse EDR download, you know, not literally the sparse, sparse cd-rw downloads just V or something, but if you get pre impact data, that is that's gold.
00;53;40;20 - 00;53;49;29
Eugene
Right. Well, let me take a couple of questions here, if you will. There's one from Mike Keith here. Let me bring that up. So he's asking, you know, if you've ever utilized dashcam video in analysis.
00;53;50;09 - 00;54;14;05
Louis
Yeah, absolutely. And so, there's a couple of things. You know, the way that I look at video analysis, which is just becoming ever more important as the days go by, just because you got so many sources for video now is there's the health of the video, like in other words, are the pixels that you're seeing accurate or are they predicted pixels on some level?
00;54;14;11 - 00;54;31;18
Louis
Then you have frame timing. That's really important. We have to know when the frame was written and if, you know, if you're good with health and you know in the frame as written, then it's just a photogrammetry project. Then It's just establishing. And I know, Eugene, you have a lot of expertise here as well, so if I say anything out of school, just let me know.
00;54;32;02 - 00;54;54;20
Louis
But then, then it's so that's one of the things Eugene and I are both. I don't think we've ever mentioned this, but we're both ambassadors for photo modeler and I think there are only two in North America. So, it's one of our one of our connections. So, then it becomes a photogrammetry analysis. So it doesn't really matter if the camera's moving, it doesn't matter if the camera's stationary.
00;54;54;20 - 00;55;15;09
Louis
As long as you have good control points, you can figure out where that camera was and anything in its field of view. So in other words, if you're trying to track a vehicle's behavior based on its own dashcam, totally feasible. If you have enough control in the background, you'll figure out where the camera was at each frame, and therefore you can calculate its speed like we were talking about earlier.
00;55;16;08 - 00;55;33;21
Louis
Conversely, if you have a motorcycle pass through a Tesla cam or something like that, if you know where the Tesla cam was moving or not, then you can also figure out where the motorcycle was moving or not. And I didn't really plan on talking about photogrammetry stuff too much, but we just published a paper in 2023 as well.
00;55;33;21 - 00;55;59;00
Louis
Ben Molnar, who's now out of GSA held in Denver, Colorado, and ME, just published this paper analyzing exactly that what we were talking about. So dash cam, stationary cameras, what is the car when the car is moving, when it's not? And that's totally feasible. It's not. The only thing I'll say is, you know, a lot of the times when you have a stationary camera, you have a lot of really good landmarks.
00;55;59;14 - 00;56;21;04
Louis
You don't have to go necessarily. I always do. As you might have gathered my personality at this point, I always do go really deep, but you don't necessarily always need to go really deep. I'd say the goal should be to account for distortion, but you can also just figure out, okay, the motorcycle passed this telephone pole here in that telephone pole there, he's going on average 73 throughout that.
00;56;21;14 - 00;56;38;16
Louis
And that gives me an idea. But so with the that's not easy to do with the dash cam. You can't necessarily do that. The dash cam like you really got to use computational photogrammetry and get down and dirty to figure out where that camera was at each key frame so that you can perform your analysis.
00;56;39;17 - 00;56;50;28
Eugene
Let's bring up one here from Tony. Hey, Tony, welcome. He's asking about the motorcycle SIM modeling and dynamic analysis. Yeah, same is car sim or are there special ones?
00;56;51;07 - 00;57;12;22
Louis
Hey, Tony, how's it going? Yeah, it is. It's Carson. So, car SIM, I think about 20 years ago came out with bikes and have continued to develop it. And they're. They're an old school. Like, I don't mean that they're not evolving. They're evolving very quickly. It's amazing. But they've been around for a really long time supporting auto manufacturers and motorcycle manufacturers.
00;57;12;22 - 00;57;28;20
Louis
And they generate this program called Bikes. It's not cheap and the learning curve is quite steep. But if you're doing a lot of motorcycle recon or it's just something that blows your hair back, I would highly recommend looking into it.
00;57;29;06 - 00;57;38;13
Eugene
Let's see here. I have got a couple things. Who was it? Robert? Does photogrammetry work on moving GoPro or dash cam video?
00;57;39;07 - 00;58;03;24
Louis
Yeah, absolutely. So. And one of the things to be aware of is I don't know if you know the app name Eugene, but there's a GoPro telemetry program out there nowadays that extracts the metadata from accelerometers in the GPS to give you that information right out of the gate. So if you have the native data, if you have the GoPro SD card or the original file, you might not even have to do photogrammetry.
00;58;04;15 - 00;58;08;10
Louis
It's possible that you could just pull that data into I think it's like 300 bucks. Do you know the name of it?
00;58;08;10 - 00;58;13;00
Eugene
Eugene, I don't. I remember seeing a presentation on it. It's really amazing the kind of data that's in there, actually.
00;58;13;10 - 00;58;39;09
Louis
Yeah. And Greg Russell has done a lot of research comparing that GoPro telemetry to data from, you know, bona fide instrumentation like Xbox. Mm hmm. And he he's found that. It's amazing. It's great. It seems to be integrating the accelerometer data and the GPS data to determine speed and position. So having said that, if you don't get that on the older GoPros, I don't think that's available.
00;58;39;09 - 00;59;02;25
Louis
It might be GoPro seven. There it is. Thank you. Telemetry extractor. That's it. So great program. I think there's a free version and then maybe two or $300 version and that might be GoPro seven when that started thereabouts. So if you're dealing with an older GoPro then absolutely. You can do photographic analysis from them. And there's a there's a couple of interesting things to note.
00;59;02;25 - 00;59;30;21
Louis
One, you could calibrate an exemplar camera. There's going to be a lot of distortion generally with GoPro. So I would recommend calibrating an exemplar camera and applying that profile to that project and that was the other thing I was going to mention about that. I think that about, oh, health, the frame rate is probably going to be pretty good with the GoPro as opposed to, you know, some building surveillance system where the resources are pinging from.
00;59;30;21 - 00;59;43;22
Louis
Six different cameras in the frame rate are variable. And if you have the metadata, you don't really know what the frame rate was with a single GoPro like that's going to be pinned at 30 frames a second most of the time. So, it's very suitable for such analysis.
00;59;44;01 - 01;00;06;17
Eugene
Yeah, I think we might have to do a session just on a video analysis. Yeah. There's a lot of questions on photogrammetry and stuff, but yeah, the frame timing is really important. Fact. I just had something not too long ago that was Tesla in-car the video and it's variable. I mean, it's, it's frame rate it's not consistent you know GoPros are usually well you can set it to 3061, 22, 40 even.
01;00;06;27 - 01;00;25;27
Eugene
Yeah. And those are usually rock solid but everything else, you just really got to check in. Let me ask you about sort of the kinds of things you're working on today and looking forward on, you know, some of the things you're working on now. Obviously, you said there's some things you're working on you want to talk about right now, but where is your focus shifting now to, you know, going forward?
01;00;26;27 - 01;01;05;25
Louis
So, I'm going to wear two separate hats, as you've probably established, is you've got the axiom, which is the consulting and then light point, which is more data production and supporting other reconstructionists and then teaching as well. So, I'll start with the axiom side. One thing that we're really diving farther and farther into is multi body simulation of motorcycle dynamics via using bike SEM as the primary tool and exploring the idea right now of building out a world class motorcycle parameter zation lab so that we have shock anemometers.
01;01;05;25 - 01;01;46;17
Louis
We can figure out what the damping coefficients are. We can get spring rates, we can measure individual components of the motorcycle, get their weights, and then potentially even get the moments of inertia of the motorcycle and its lump sum components. So that's something that's really exciting to me. It'd be a big investment to do that, but it would allow us to analyze some things that I think are, again, big gaps right now in our knowledge, how a motorcycle is going to interact with a pothole, how a motorcycle is going to interact with an edge trap and understanding these things more can inform construction companies all over the world, like, okay, if you're paving lane number
01;01;46;17 - 01;02;08;23
Louis
one, what does that transition to? The adjacent lane that's ground down has to look like to make sure that motorcyclists don't get themselves into trouble. So and then we get a lot of cases like that. We're hired by municipalities a lot of the time where they're, you know, the argument is that the roadway caused the issue. So can't really analyze that with a regular simulation program.
01;02;08;23 - 01;02;28;22
Louis
You need multi body dynamics simulator. So, we're looking into that. And then on the light point side, we have a lot of things going where we got the point cloud database up. We have like 800 point clouds now and that's going really well. It's been received shockingly I knew would be good, but it's been it's taken off more than I thought, which is awesome.
01;02;28;22 - 01;02;57;03
Louis
And now we're converting those all we're making them all meshes. So, we'll have point clouds and meshes. And as you know, Eugene, like turning point clouds and meshes has been kind of this really difficult process over the years. So we finally have developed a process that is semi-automated but is finished off by hand to get a beautiful, really accurate mesh that's really low poly from these point clouds.
01;02;57;14 - 01;03;31;00
Louis
So, you're not going to have to go 2 to 1 of the modeling sites and just grab something that may or may not be accurate. So, we're really pumped there. And then education with light point. We recently launched Light point learning. The first class is my class, which is a motorcycle collision reconstruction class. But then we're hoping to bring on kind of the best of the best from all sorts of disciplines and bring them to this online hybrid platform where the classes can be viewed, they're recorded and they can be viewed any time, anywhere from the attendees.
01;03;31;00 - 01;03;46;26
Louis
And then there's live office hours. So you say, okay, the class is available this week and there's 2 hours of office hours every day so you can meet with the instructor, can meet with your peers. So we're going down that rabbit hole and then we have, you know, I'm super excited about the other project we're working on right now.
01;03;46;26 - 01;03;56;13
Louis
It's like just a giant scaled project by hopefully at Rex 2023, I can I can unveil that one and let you know what's going on.
01;03;56;29 - 01;04;02;20
Eugene
I've got a question here by Oscar, but he talks about in context any problem. If I share the LinkedIn thing here and if I. Yeah, no.
01;04;02;20 - 01;04;03;16
Louis
That'll be great. Yeah.
01;04;03;16 - 01;04;17;07
Eugene
Okay. Actually, while you while I'm doing that, can you talk about Rex? Because Rex is a big deal. Actually, I got invited. This will be my first one for me. And I know you're the keynote there. So, tell me about your involvement. All that with Rex.
01;04;17;18 - 01;04;39;24
Louis
Yeah. So, you know, there's been. This will be the third Rex ever. I think the first was in 2000, then the next was in 2016. And I did the motorcycle crash testing there and that presented a bit on motorcycle topics. And then this year I'll be giving the keynote, as you mentioned, which is really exciting and simultaneously terrifying because it's a huge crowd.
01;04;39;24 - 01;05;10;20
Louis
I think it's like 1200 people. So no argument that it's going to be the biggest crash reconstruction conference ever held. And specifically my keynote is going to be on the current state of recon and where it's heading. And I don't pretend to be an expert in everything. So the way I'm going to do that and I'm really excited about this is interview everybody who has is top of their discipline and figure out what tools they're using now.
01;05;10;21 - 01;05;31;04
Louis
What are they doing now? What is the state of the art and where do they think that things are going to be heading so that we can all prepare accordingly? Obviously, there's a lot of changes happening right now, just one in the available technology and then two in the vehicle technology. So and then, Eugene, you've been gracious enough to accept my invitation to be one of those interviewees.
01;05;31;04 - 01;05;35;21
Louis
So you'll be a part of that presentation, whether you know it or not.
01;05;36;22 - 01;05;54;00
Eugene
Well, thank you. That's great. Well, look, we've been going on here for a little bit. We've had some great topics. And Lou, it's always a pleasure to talk to you. I know that we could do a deep dive in any of the any one of these topics. And some point in the future, I think we will. We'll get you back and we'll you know, maybe talk about something just really more focused and specific.
01;05;54;00 - 01;06;04;26
Eugene
But listen, I want to wish you all the best. I'm really looking forward to shaking hands with you at Rex and being in person. And I know there's a whole bunch of people are going to be interested in being there, too. So, listen, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
01;06;05;15 - 01;06;06;21
Louis
Thank you. Again, it's been fun.
01;06;07;11 - 01;06;10;24
Eugene
So, look, everybody, have a great Thursday. I wish you all the best. To you, too. Bye.