A novel method for side slip angle estimation of omni-directional vehicles

The omni-directional vehicle is an innovative vehicle, in which the in-wheel steering motor and in-wheel driving motor are integrated into each wheel of the vehicle so that each wheel can be independently controlled to have traction, braking, and turning motions to improve the vehicle's mobility, handling and stability. To realize good performance, various control strategies have been proposed, like the active steering control and the direct yaw moment control, where the accurate slip angle information is critical to these control strategies. However, in practice, the side slip angle is hard or expensive to be measured for a passenger vehicle, therefore, different estimation methods have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, a novel side slip angle estimation method is proposed for the omni-directional vehicle that has four independent steering motors. This method includes the estimation of total alignment torque and side slip angle, and only needs the measurements of steering angles and steering motor currents, which are available by using angle sensors and current sensors embedded with the in-wheel steering motors. Numerical simulations are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed side slip angle estimation approach. 2014 SAE International.