Estimating vehicle sideslip angle through kinematic and dynamic contributions: Theory and experimental results

Vehicle lateral stability plays an important role within vehicle passenger safety. The study of lateral stability is typically related to investigating the dynamics of relevant vehicle states: among these, the vehicle sideslip angle ( <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>β</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> ) emerges as a prominent candidate. Sideslip angle measurement is expensive and impractical, hence estimation techniques are often used, typically based on Kalman filters or neural networks, both with their issues. This work presents an alternative estimation method based on the idea of splitting sideslip angle into kinematic and dynamic contributions, and by observing that the kinematic contribution is straightforward to estimate. Therefore, efforts are devoted into estimating dynamic sideslip angle, which is herein obtained through a parametric interpolation harnessing lateral acceleration. Only data available from traditional vehicle onboard sensors are used in the process. Experimental results are presented along several manoeuvres on a full-scale vehicle, with the estimator running online within a dSPACE unit, ultimately supporting the efficacy and real-time feasibility of the proposed approach.