Sensor fusion based on a Dual Kalman Filter for estimation of road irregularities and vehicle mass under static and dynamic conditions

Mass is an important parameter in vehicle dynamics because it affects not only safety but also comfort. The mass influences the three movements corresponding to vehicle dynamics. Therefore, having an accurate value of mass is essential for having a suitable model which will lead to proper controller and observer operation. Additionally, unlike other vehicle parameters, the mass can vary during a trip due to loading and unloading items and passengers onto the vehicle, greatly influencing its dynamics. This is critical in heavy vehicles where the mass can vary by around 400%. Therefore, the mass must be updated on-line. The novelty of this paper is the construction of a state-parameter observer which allows the mass under static and dynamic driving conditions to be estimated using measurements from sensors that can be mounted easily on vehicles. In this study, a vertical complete model is considered based on the dual Kalman filter for mass and road irregularities estimation using the data obtained from suspension deflection sensors and a vertical accelerometer. Both simulation and experimental results are carried out to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.This work was supported by Projects TRA2008-05373/AUT and TRA2013-48030-C2-1-R from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

Sensor Fusion Based on an Integrated Neural Network and Probability Density Function (PDF) Dual Kalman Filter for On-Line Estimation of Vehicle Parameters and States

Vehicles with a high center of gravity (COG), such as light trucks and heavy vehicles, are prone to rollover. This kind of accident causes nearly 33% of all deaths from passenger vehicle crashes. Nowadays, these vehicles are incorporating roll stability control (RSC) systems to improve their safety. Most of the RSC systems require the vehicle roll angle as a known input variable to predict the lateral load transfer. The vehicle roll angle can be directly measured by a dual antenna global positioning system (GPS), but it is expensive. For this reason, it is important to estimate the vehicle roll angle from sensors installed onboard in current vehicles. On the other hand, the knowledge of the vehicle's parameters values is essential to obtain an accurate vehicle response. Some of vehicle parameters cannot be easily obtained and they can vary over time. In this paper, an algorithm for the simultaneous on-line estimation of vehicle's roll angle and parameters is proposed. This algorithm uses a probability density function (PDF)-based truncation method in combination with a dual Kalman filter (DKF), to guarantee that both vehicle's states and parameters are within bounds that have a physical meaning, using the information obtained from sensors mounted on vehicles. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.This work is supported by the Spanish Government through the Project TRA2013-48030-C2-1-R, which is gratefully acknowledged

Joint vehicle state and parameters estimation via Twin-in-the-Loop observers

Vehicular control systems are required to be both extremely reliable and robust to different environmental conditions, e.g. load or tire-road friction. In this paper, we extend a new paradigm for state estimation, called Twin-in-the-Loop filtering (TiL-F), to the estimation of the unknown parameters describing the vehicle operating conditions. In such an approach, a digital-twin of the vehicle (usually already available to the car manufacturer) is employed on-board as a plant replica within a closed-loop scheme, and the observer gains are tuned purely from experimental data. The proposed approach is validated against experimental data, showing to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art solutions.Comment: Preprint under review at Vehicle Systems Dynamic

Kalman and particle filtering methods for full vehicle and tyre identification

This paper considers identification of all significant vehicle handling dynamics of a test vehicle, including identification of a combined-slip tyre model, using only those sensors currently available on most vehicle controller area network buses. Using an appropriately simple but efficient model structure, all of the independent parameters are found from test vehicle data, with the resulting model accuracy demonstrated on independent validation data. The paper extends previous work on augmented Kalman Filter state estimators to concentrate wholly on parameter identification. It also serves as a review of three alternative filtering methods; identifying forms of the unscented Kalman filter, extended Kalman filter and particle filter are proposed and compared for effectiveness, complexity and computational efficiency. All three filters are suited to applications of system identification and the Kalman Filters can also operate in real-time in on-line model predictive controllers or estimators

A Survey of Positioning Systems Using Visible LED Lights

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems.Peer reviewe

Novel Framework for Navigation using Enhanced Fuzzy Approach with Sliding Mode Controller

The reliability of any embedded navigator in advanced vehicular system depends upon correct and precise information of navigational data captured and processed to offer trustworthy path. After reviewing the existing system, a significant trade-off is explored between the existing navigational system and present state of controller design on various case studies and applications. The existing design of controller system for navigation using error-prone GPS/INS data doesn‟t emphasize on sliding mode controller. Although, there has been good number of studies in sliding mode controller, it is less attempted to optimize the navigational performance of a vehicle. Therefore, this paper presents a novel optimized design of a sliding mode controller that can be effectively deployed on advanced navigational system. The study outcome was found to offer higher speed, optimal control signal, and lower error occurances to prove that proposed system offers reliable and optimized navigational services in contrast to existing system

On the vehicle sideslip angle estimation: a literature review of methods, models and innovations

Typical active safety systems controlling the dynamics of passenger cars rely on real-time monitoring of the vehicle sideslip angle (VSA), together with other signals like wheel angular velocities, steering angle, lateral acceleration, and the rate of rotation about the vertical axis, known as the yaw rate. The VSA (aka attitude or “drifting” angle) is defined as the angle between the vehicle longitudinal axis and the direction of travel, taking the centre of gravity as a reference. It is basically a measure of the misalignment between vehicle orientation and trajectory therefore it is a vital piece of information enabling directional stability assessment, in transients following emergency manoeuvres for instance. As explained in the introduction the VSA is not measured directly for impracticality and it is estimated on the basis of available measurements like wheel velocities, linear and angular accelerations etc. This work is intended to provide a comprehensive literature review on the VSA estimation problem. Two main estimation methods have been categorised, i.e. Observer-based and Neural Network-based, focusing on the most effective and innovative approaches. As the first method normally relies on a vehicle model, a review of the vehicle models has been included. Advantages and limitations of each technique have been highlighted and discussed

Vehicle sideslip angle measurement based on sensor data fusion using an integrated ANFIS and an Unscented Kalman Filter algorithm

Most existing ESC (Electronic Stability Control) systems rely on the measurement of both yaw rate and sideslip angle. However, one of the main issues is that the sideslip angle cannot be measured directly because the sensors are too expensive. For this reason, sideslip angle estimation has been widely discussed in the relevant literature. The modeling of sideslip angle is complex due to the non-linear dynamics of the vehicle. In this paper, we propose a novel observer based on ANFIS, combined with Kalman Filters in order to estimate the sideslip angle, which in turn is used to control the vehicle dynamics and improve its behavior. For this reason, low-cost sensor measurements which are integrated into the actual vehicle and executed in real time have to be used. The ANFIS system estimates a "pseudo-sideslip angle" through parameters which are easily measured, using sensors equipped in actual vehicles (inertial sensors and steering wheel sensors); this value is introduced in UKF in order to filter noise and to minimize the variance of the estimation mean square error. The estimator has been validated by comparing the observed proposal with the values provided by the CARSIM model, which is a piece of experimentally validated software. The advantage of this estimation is the modeling of the non-linear dynamics of the vehicle, by means of signals which are directly measured from vehicle sensors. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed ANFIS+UKF-based sideslip angle estimator

Rapid Transfer Alignment of SINS with Measurement Packet Dropping based on a Novel Suboptimal Estimator

Transfer alignment (TA) is an important step for strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) starting from a moving base, which utilises the information proposed from the higher accurate and well performed master inertial navigation system. But the information is often delayed or even lost in real application, which will seriously affect the accuracy of TA. This paper models the stochastic measurement packet dropping as an independent identically distributed (IID) Bernoulli random process, and introduces it into the measurement equation of rapid TA, and the influence of measurement packet dropping is analysed. Then, it presents a suboptimal estimator for the estimation of the misalignment in TA considering the random arrival of the measurement packet. Simulation has been done for the performance comparison about the suboptimal estimator, standard Kalman filter and minimum mean squared estimator. The results show that the suboptimal estimator has better performance, which can achieve the best TA accuracy