Estimation of Tire Side-Slip Angles Based on the Frequency Domain Lateral Acceleration Characteristics Inside Tires

The identification and control of tire side slip angle is the key to vehicle stability control. Intelligent tire technology based on the sensing of side-slip acceleration inside the tire provides a novel method for estimating the tire side-slip angle. This study proposed a method to estimate the tire side-slip angle by using the frequency domain lateral acceleration of the tire. First, an intelligent tire testing system was constructed by independently developing a special rim assembly and data collector. A three-axis accelerometer was placed on the right side of the tire, and the acceleration value was acquired by using a wired method with a sampling frequency of 50 kHz. Second, based on the constructed test system, a tire side deflection test was carried out on the Flat Trac bench. Through data analysis, it was found that the lateral acceleration was in the frequency domain of 400 Hz. As the side-slip angle increased from −4° to 4°, the vibration amplitude gradually decreased. Moreover, the vibration amplitude within 0.5~2 kHz was highly correlated with the side-slip angle. Subsequently, the vibration amplitude of the lateral acceleration within 2 kHz was extracted at an interval of 20 Hz as the feature point, and a frequency domain data set FDAy3 was established together with the vertical load and tire pressure. Finally, the support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was employed to make predictions on the data set. The grid search method was utilized to find the optimal parameter values of the model penalty factor c and radial basis kernel function coefficient g, which were 1.4142 and 0.0884, respectively. The results suggested that the root mean square error of the model prediction was 0.0806°, and the maximum estimated angle deviation of the prediction was 0.4587°. Meanwhile, the optimal prediction accuracy and real-time performance were achieved when the number of feature points and the feature frequency band were 25 and within 500 Hz, respectively. The findings of this study confirm that it is feasible to estimate the tire side-slip angle based on the frequency domain lateral acceleration of the tire, which provides a new method for tire side-slip angle estimation.