Simultaneous estimation of tire side-slip angle and lateral tire force for vehicle lateral stability control

Abstract Knowledge of tire side-slip angle and lateral tire force is crucial to vehicle lateral stability control which can enhance vehicle handling and passenger safety. However, due to high costs of sensors and limitations to sensor technologies, ordinary automobiles cannot measure the tire side-slip angle and lateral tire force directly during vehicle operation. Therefore, the accurate, affordable monitoring of lateral vehicle motion is essential. This paper presents a unified observation algorithm to simultaneously estimate the tire side-slip angle and lateral tire force of all four wheels. Firstly, an adaptive-sliding-mode observer (ASMO) is utilized to estimate the lateral tire force of each wheel. Secondly, the tire side-slip angle of each wheel can be estimated by an adaptive compensation algorithm (ACA). Simulations and real car experiments are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, and extended kalman filter (EKF) is used to compare with our proposed algorithm. Results show that the designed observer can effectively estimate tire side-slip angles and lateral tire forces of all four wheels, and its performance is better than EKF.