A method to estimate the lateral tire force and the sideslip angle of a vehicle: Experimental validation

The motion of a vehicle is governed by the forces generated between the tires and the road. Knowledge of these dynamic variables is important for vehicle control systems that aim to enhance vehicle stability and passenger safety. Unfortunately, it is difficult to obtain these data because of technical and economic reasons, therefore, they must be estimated. This study introduces a new estimation process for lateral tire/road forces and vehicle´s sideslip angle. The proposed method presents many benefits over the existing state-of-art works, within the dynamic estimation framework. One of these major contributions consists of evaluating the lateral tire forces at each tire and not per axle. The proposed estimation method is derived from the Extended Kalman filter and is based on the dynamic response of a vehicle instrumented with potentially integrable sensors. The performance of this concept is tested and compared to real experimental data using a laboratory car. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is a promising technique to provide accurate estimations of vehicle dynamic states.