Review of multidimensional wheel force measurement technology: sensing principles, decoupling calibration, dynamic processing and applications

Purpose This paper aims to review multidimensional wheel force sensing technology across automobiles, aircraft landing gears, planetary rovers and wheeled/wheel-legged robots and establish a unified framework linking contact load generation, sensor transduction, calibration, dynamic processing and application-oriented use of wheel-force information. Design/methodology/approach Representative studies are compared from six aspects: contact stress equivalence, load transfer and sensing transduction, error propagation and coordinate transformation, linear and nonlinear decoupling calibration, dynamic filtering and multisource fusion and closed-loop applications of wheel-force information. Findings Although the application scenarios differ in contact media, structural constraints and engineering objectives, they share a common technical chain involving rotating-coordinate errors, structural-signal coupling, working-condition migration and long-term drift. The field has evolved from static offline measurement to dynamic online perception. Interpretable nonlinear methods, online recalibration and multisource fusion are emerging as the most promising directions. Originality/value The review takes multidimensional wheel force sensing, rather than a single industry, as the central object of discussion. It integrates common mechanisms across automotive, aerospace, planetary rover and robotic studies and highlights future extensions toward wheel-end and joint-actuation systems.