Applying a three-antenna GPS and suspension displacement sensors to a road vehicle

This paper presents a novel sensor fusion system for road vehicles, which mainly composed of a three-antenna Global Positioning System (GPS), and four suspension displacement sensors. This sensor system not only obtains accurate six degree-of-freedom (DOF) information for vehicle dynamics but also road angles in real time. The road angles and vehicle attitude are difficult to be detected using on-board sensors because they are often coupled in the sensor measurements. Most approaches ignore this coupling effect; only a few try to obtain them by state estimations using vehicle models. The proposed method solve this problem, without requiring any vehicle model, by incorporating a non-inertial sensor (suspension displacement sensors) with inertial sensors (three-antenna GPS). In a demonstrating case, an additional inertial measurement unit (IMU) is included in the senor system to improve the estimation accuracy. Simulation results indicate that the accuracy of the estimated vehicle attitude is less than 0.85 deg, and that of the estimated road angles is less than 0.3 deg. Additionally, the estimation accuracy of the vertical displacement is improved from 3 m to 0.248 m.