Estimating the Tire-Road Friction Coefficient Using Disturbance Observer with Compensator

ABSTRACT

The tire-road friction coefficient is critical to the performance of mobile robots working outdoors. However, it is difficult to measure using commercially available technology sensors. This paper presents a method of estimating the tire-road friction coefficient using a disturbance observer (DO) with compensator; the chassis speed is not needed. In this paper, the torque produced by the tire-road friction is considered to be the disturbance. The DO with compensator is designed to estimate the tire-road friction coefficient using the dynamic behavior of the vehicle model, the traction torque and the wheel velocity. The simulation result shows that the proposed method can estimate the tire-road friction coefficient accurately under different road conditions and has strong robustness on modeling mismatch and vehicle load changing.

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