Road Weather Management Program
photos of lightning, trucks plowing snow, an empty road before a storm, and an evacuation
Office of Operations 21st century operations using 21st century technologies

Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0

Best Practices > Publications > Publication Titles

Title:

On-line Estimation of Friction Coefficients of Winter Road Surfaces Using Unscented Kalman Filter

Abstract:

The previously proposed method of estimating the friction coefficient of winter road surfaces was utterly innovated by introducing unscented Kalman filter instead of generic algorithm while keeping the core vehicular motion model unchanged. First of all, it was pointed out that the current problem was too complicated to apply conventional feedback techniques, such as an extended Kalman filter, because the system included not only a nonlinear algebra equation but also a set of multiple differential equations. Next, a new concept in Kalman filter theory known as unscented Kalman was proved to be effective in overcoming the difficulty because the new filter did not require any implicit function of state and observation equations in deriving Kalman gain. This paper presents how useful the new filter is in dealing with the current problem. Some numerical experiments validated the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of computational efficiencies. The friction coefficients estimated by the new technique were fairly in good accordance with those actually measured from real field.

Source(s):

86th Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting; Hokkaido University, Hatachi, Ltd. and Kitami Institute of Technology (Japan). For an electronic copy of this resource, please direct your request to WeatherFeedback@dot.gov.

Date: 2007

Author:

Nakatsuji, Hayashi, Ranjitkar, Shirakawa, Kawamura

Keywords:


Pavement friction

PDF files can be viewed with the Acrobat® Reader®.
Office of Operations