Trailer Mass Estimation Using System Model-Based and Machine Learning Approaches

Abstract

Trailer mass is one of the important trailer parameters that affects the stability of the tractor-trailer systems. In this paper, two different approaches are proposed to estimate trailer mass for arbitrary tractor-trailer configurations; dynamic system model-based and Machine Learning (ML) approaches. The stability of the dynamic system model-based estimation algorithm is analyzed, establishing the convergence of the estimation error to zero. In the proposed ML-based approach, a Deep Neural Network (DNN) is designed to estimate trailer mass. The inputs of the ML-based method have been selected based on the tractor-trailer dynamic model, and are considered to be normalized by the tractor mass, tire sizes, and geometry so that re-training of the network is not needed for different towing vehicles. The simulation and experimental results justify the accuracy of the trailer mass estimation in various cases and demonstrate that the trailer mass can be estimated with less than 10% error.