Opinion Dynamics-Based Vehicle Velocity Estimation and Diagnosis

An opinion dynamics approach is proposed to enhance the reliability of the vehicle velocity estimators, which are required for autonomous driving as well as advanced vehicle active safety systems, such as traction and stability control. The corners' estimates of a velocity observer, which is formed by combining the kinematic and model-based estimation schemes, are used as opinions with different levels of confidence in the developed algorithm. This is to find more reliable estimates robust to disturbances and time delay via solving a convex optimization problem. To bypass the effect of failure in velocity estimation, a fault rejection policy is used concurrently with the opinion dynamics. Road tests confirm the validity and robustness of the algorithm on slippery and dry roads independent of the powertrain configuration in different driving scenarios, especially for combined-slip and low-excitation maneuvers, which are demanding for the current vehicle state estimators.