Effective Combination of Vertical, Longitudinal and Lateral Data for Vehicle Mass Estimation

Real-time knowledge of the vehicle mass is valuable for several applications, mainly: active safety systems design and energy consumption optimization. This work describes a novel strategy for mass estimation in static and dynamic conditions. First, when the vehicle is powered-up, an initial estimation is given by observing the variations of one suspension deflection sensor mounted on the rear. Then, the estimation is refined based on conditioned and filtered longitudinal and lateral motions. In this study, we suggest using these extracted events on two different algorithms, namely: the recursive least squares and the prior-recursive Bayesian inference. That is to express the results in a deterministic and statistical sense. Both simulations and experimental tests show that our approach encompasses the benefits of various works in the literature, preeminently, robustness to resistive loads, fast convergence, and minimal instrumentation.