Monitoring system design for estimating the lateral tire force

It is not feasible in the operating vehicles to measure the tire forces directly because of high cost of sensors, limitations in sensor technology, interference with tire rotation and harsh environment. In this paper, in order to develop tire force monitoring systems, a monitoring model is proposed utilizing not only the vehicle dynamics but also the roll motion. Based on the monitoring model, a monitoring system is designed to estimate the lateral tire force acting on each tire. The monitoring system is constructed based on a new SKFMEC (scaled Kalman filter with model error compensator) technique that is developed in this study to improve the robustness performance of Kalman Filter methods. The SKFMEC technique adopts both well-conditioned observer and the model error compensator concepts. Tire force estimation performance of the monitoring system is evaluated in the Matlab simulations where true tire force data is generated from a 14 DOF vehicle model with the combined-slip Magic Formula tire model.