LAUSR

Abstract Tire-road friction coefficient (TRFC) is of critical importance for advanced vehicle control systems and autonomous vehicle applications. This paper presents a sequential tire longitudinal stiffness and TRFC estimation method for road vehicles by separate control of the front and rear wheels, for which only standard Kalman filter (KF) and recursive least squares (RLS) techniques are required. While braking torque is actively applied to rear wheels, the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) speed controller dictates the corresponding driving torque to front wheels to compensate the decrease of the vehicle longitudinal speed. Tire force of rear tires are estimated based on the KF, both longitudinal stiffness and TRFC of rear tires are identified using RLS technique. The proposed method has simple structure and the potential of estimating the parameters without severely affecting the vehicle’s desired longitudinal speed. Simulation results from vehicle dynamics software CarSim and Matlab/Simulink validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.