On the vehicle state estimation benefits of smart tires

Smart tires are systems that are able to measure temperature, inflation pressure, footprint dimensions, and, importantly, tire contact forces. The integration of this additional information with the signals ob-tained from more conventional vehicle sensors, e.g., inertial measure-ment units, can enhance state estimation in production cars. This paper evaluates the use of smart tires to improve the estimation performance of an Unscented Kalman filter (UKF) based on a nonlinear vehicle dynam-ics model. Two UKF implementations, excluding and including smart tire information, are compared in terms of estimation accuracy of vehicle speed, sideslip angle and tire-road friction coefficient, using experi-mental data obtained on a high performance passenger car.