Event-Triggered Vehicle Sideslip Angle Estimation Based on Low-Cost Sensors

Accurate vehicle sideslip angle estimation is crucial for vehicle stability control. In this article, an enabling event-triggered sideslip angle estimator is proposed by using the kinematic information from a low-cost global positioning system (GPS) and an on-board inertial measurement unit (IMU). First, a preliminary vehicle sideslip angle is derived using the heading angle of GPS and the yaw rate of IMU, and an event-triggered mechanism is proposed to eliminate the accumulative estimation error. The algorithm convergence is guaranteed through theoretical deduction. Second, a longitudinal and a lateral vehicle velocity are obtained using the preliminary vehicle sideslip angle and the measured GPS velocity and their kinematic relationship, based on which a multisensor fusion and a multistep Kalman filter scheme are, respectively, presented to realize longitudinal and lateral vehicle velocity estimation. By doing this, the update frequency and estimation accuracy of the vehicle sideslip angle estimate can be further improved to meet the requirement of online implementation. Finally, the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed scheme are verified under comprehensive driving conditions through both hardware-in-loop (HIL) and field tests. The results show that the proposed event-triggered sideslip angle estimator has a mean estimation error of 0.029° and of 0.14° in the HIL and field tests, exhibiting better estimation accuracy, reliability, and real-time performance compared with other typical estimators.