An improved adaptive unscented Kalman filter for estimating the states of in‐wheel‐motored electric vehicle

Summary Vehicle state is essential for active safety stability control. However, the accurate measurement of some vehicle states is difficult to achieve without the use of expensive equipment. To improve estimation accuracy in real time, this paper proposes an estimator of vehicle velocity based on the adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) for an in‐wheel‐motored electric vehicle (IWMEV). Given the merits of an independent drive structure, the tire forces of the IWMEV can be directly calculated through a vehicle dynamic model. Additionally, by means of the normalized innovation square, the validity of vehicle velocity estimation can be detected, and the sliding window length can be adjusted adaptively; thus, the steady‐state error and the dynamic performance of the IWMEV are demonstrated to be simultaneously improved over an alternative approach in comparisons. Then, an adaptive adjustment strategy for the noise covariance matrices is introduced to overcome the impact of parameter uncertainties. The numerically simulated and experimental results prove that the proposed vehicle velocity estimator based on AUKF not only improves estimation accuracy but also possesses strong robustness against parameter uncertainties. The deployment of the estimation algorithm by using a single‐chip microcomputer verifies the strong real‐time performance and easy‐to‐implement characteristics of the proposed algorithm.