Effective assessment of tyre–road friction coefficient using a hybrid estimator

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Vehicle stability and active safety control depend heavily on tyre forces available on each wheel of a vehicle. Since tyre forces are strongly affected by the tyre–road friction coefficient, it is crucial to optimise the use of the adhesion limits of the tyres. This study presents a hybrid method to identify the road friction limitation; it contributes significantly to active vehicle safety. A hybrid estimator is developed based on the three degrees-of-freedom vehicle model, which considers longitudinal, lateral and yaw motions. The proposed hybrid estimator includes two sub-estimators: one is the vehicle state information estimator using the unscented Kalman filter and another is the integrated road friction estimator. By connecting two sub-estimators simultaneously, the proposed algorithm can effectively estimate the road friction coefficient. The performance of the proposed estimation algorithm is validated in CarSim/Matlab co-simulation environment under three different road conditions (high-μ, low-μ and mixed-μ). Simulation results show that the proposed estimator can assess vehicle states and road friction coefficient with good accuracy.