A Model-Based Observer for Intelligent Tire Concepts

In the last decades, several intelligent concepts have been developed based on different sensors. Nowadays, one of the major research issue for intelligent tire studies is how to correlate measurements provided by sensors to the tire dynamics. The most widespread approaches are based on signal processing techniques which are expensive and time-consuming due to the large amount of data to be collected. In this paper, a model-based observer to estimate the forces acting on the tire starting from tread strain measurements is presented. The proposed mathematical model is the Flexible Ring Tire Model, which is capable of describing the longitudinal dynamics of intelligent tire systems and consists of a deformable ring supported by a viscoelastic foundation. The system has been simulated in MATLAB-Simulink environment and the loads acting on the tire have been included in the state-space representation of the model. In this way, the Unscented Kalman Filter has been employed to estimate both the state and the forces exchanged with the road in the contact patch.