Development of a Smart Tire System and its Use in Improving the Performance of a Collision Mitigation Braking System Available to Purchase

At present, the commercially available tire monitoring systems are not equipped to sense and transmit high speed dynamic variables used for real-time active safety control systems. Hence, today’s vehicle control systems are limited by the lack of knowledge of critical tire-road states (i.e. the kinematic conditions of the tire to its dynamic properties). From aforementioned discussion, it is clear that some method of estimating tire-road contact parameters would be greatly desirable. Existing tire-road friction estimation approaches often require certain levels of vehicle longitudinal and/or lateral motion to satisfy the persistence of excitation condition for reliable estimations. Such excitations may undesirably interfere with vehicle motion controls. This paper presents a novel development and implementation of a real-time tire-road contact parameter estimation methodology using acceleration signals from a smart tire. The proposed method characterizes the terrain using the measured frequency response of the tire vibrations and provides the capability to estimate the tire road friction coefficient under extremely lower levels of force utilization. Under higher levels of force excitation (high slip conditions), the increased vibration levels due to the stick/slip phenomenon linked to the tread block vibration modes make the proposed tire vibrations based method unsuitable. Therefore for high slip conditions, a tire-road friction model-based parameter estimation approach is proposed. Hence an integrated approach using the smart tire based friction estimator and the model based estimator gives us the capability to reliably estimate friction for a wider range of excitations. Considering the strong interdependence between the operating road surface condition and the instantaneous forces and moments generated; this real time estimate of the tire-road friction coefficient is expected to play a pivotal role in improving the performance of a number of vehicle control systems. In particular, this paper focuses on the possibility of enhancing the performance of collision mitigation braking systems.