Development and experimental evaluation of an online estimation system for vehicle mass

As active chassis controllers are becoming increasingly complex and sophisticated, the performance of these controllers is very sensitive to a vehicle's inertial parameters such as the vehicle mass and mass centre height. Also, these parameters vary with the number of passengers and with different load situations. In this paper, in order to determine the vehicle mass during arbitrary vehicle manoeuvring, an online estimation system is proposed considering available driving conditions, which includes two estimation algorithms. One is designed on the basis of the vehicle's longitudinal motion using the recursive least-squares method with the disturbance observer technique. The other is designed on the basis of the vehicle's lateral motion by estimating the lateral velocity. Then, two estimation algorithms are combined to extract the vehicle mass information using the recursive least-squares method. The performance of the proposed estimation system is demonstrated through experimental tests.