A Beta-less Approach for Vehicle Cornering Stiffness Estimation

With an increasing number of driver assistance functions and the upcoming trend of autonomous driving, knowledge of the current state and changeable parameters of the vehicle becomes increasingly essential. Particularly significant parameters with regard to vehicle lateral dynamics are the cornering stiffnesses, which describe the tire lateral forces depending on the current slip angles. Thus, the cornering stiffness characterizes the current lateral force of a tire, which heavily varies over different tires and decreases by tire wear. However, its knowledge is crucial for describing the vehicle dynamics behavior. Therefore, vehicle control algorithms and driver assistance functions would highly benefit from knowledge of the vehicle cornering stiffness values, which could increase driving comfort and safety. For that purpose, this paper introduces an online estimation algorithm for the tire cornering stiffness values. Only typical vehicle series sensors are required for the algorithm, which ensures its applicability for series vehicles. Finally, vehicle measurements are conducted in order to validate the proposed estimation algorithm by means of the resulting cornering stiffnesses. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors.