Lateral vehicle dynamics control and vehicle state estimation: A tyre force measurement based approach

Abstract

In assessing and controlling vehicle dynamics, tyre forces are the most important variables as they are the only point of interaction with the road. Estimating tyre forces is difficult because of their nonlinear characteristics. Therefore, most of the lateral vehicle dynamics controllers and estimators in the literature use a tyre model that introduces modeling error because of the tyre model nonlinearities and uncertainties. This may degrade the controller and estimator performance. On the other hand, modeling with tyre force measurements improves the model accuracy and therefore might improve the controller and estimator performance. The primary objective of this PhD research is to study the benefits of tyre force measurement on lateral VehicleDynamics Control (VDC) and Vehicle State Estimation (VSE). The lateral VDCs and VSEs studied in this dissertation are therefore based on tyre force measurement. This PhD research is a part of an ongoing research at TU Delft on Load Sensing Bearing (LSB) based VDC. The LSB technology is invented at SKF and it measures individual tyre forces. In the previous PhD dissertation, longitudinal VDC using the LSB technology has been the main focus of research. In this PhD dissertation, lateral VDCs and VSEs using tyre forcemeasurements are studied. This dissertation shows that the force based methods can be adapted to many VDC aspects. In particular, the contributions of this dissertation are the proposed Tyre Utilization Coefficients Control using steering actuators, yaw rate control using braking actuators, vehicle sideslip estimator and the road-tyre friction estimator considering combined tyre slip. The estimators are also validated using test data. Overall, this dissertation offers a positive recommendation on LSB based VDC and VSE but more work needs to be done on the LSB technology.