Vertical Tire Forces Estimation of Multi-Axle Trucks Based on an Adaptive Treble Extend Kalman Filter

Abstract

Vertical tire forces are essential for vehicle modelling and dynamic control. However, an evaluation of the vertical tire forces on a multi-axle truck is difficult to accomplish. The current methods require a large amount of experimental data and many sensors owing to the wide variation of the parameters and the over-constraint. To simplify the design process and reduce the demand of the sensors, this paper presents a practical approach to estimating the vertical tire forces of a multi-axle truck for dynamic control. The estimation system is based on a novel vertical force model and a proposed adaptive treble extend Kalman filter (ATEKF). To adapt to the widely varying parameters, a sliding mode update is designed to make the ATEKF adaptive, and together with the use of an initial setting update and a vertical tire force adjustment, the overall system becomes more robust. In particular, the model aims to eliminate the effects of the over-constraint and the uneven weight distribution. The results show that the ATEKF method achieves an excellent performance in a vertical force evaluation, and its performance is better than that of the treble extend Kalman filter.