A comparative study of the unscented Kalman filter and particle filter estimation methods for the measurement of the road adhesion coefficient

Abstract. The measurement of the road adhesion coefficient is of great significance for the vehicle active safety control system and is one of the key technologies for future autonomous driving. With a focus on the problems of interference uncertainty and system nonlinearity in the estimation of the road adhesion coefficient, this work adopts a vehicle model with 7 degrees of freedom (7-DOF) and the Dugoff tire model and uses these models to estimate the road adhesion coefficient in real time based on the particle filter (PF) algorithm. The estimations using the PF algorithm are verified by selecting typical working conditions, and they are compared with estimations using the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) algorithm. Simulation results show that the road adhesion coefficient estimator error based on the UKF algorithm is less than 7 %, whereas the road adhesion coefficient estimator error based on the PF algorithm is less than 0.1 %. Thus, compared with the UKF algorithm, the PF algorithm has a higher accuracy and control effect with respect to estimating the road adhesion coefficient under different road conditions. In order to verify the robustness of the road adhesion coefficient estimator, an automobile test platform based on a four-wheel-hub-motor car is built. According to the experimental results, the estimator based on the PF algorithm can realize the road surface identification with an error of less than 1 %, which verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithm with respect to estimating the road adhesion coefficient and shows good robustness.