For modern vehicle development, on-board vehicle Mass and road Gradient Estimation (MGE) can offer great benefit to many sub-systems on the vehicle, such as vehicle control system, transmission control system, and active safety system etc. However, there are still several challenges that need to be solved. Firstly, thanks to good accuracy, reliability, and robustness, regression analysis-based approaches: Recursive Least Squares (RLS) and Kalman Filter (KF) are very popular for MGE, but the trade-off between estimator’s accuracy and converge time is challenging. Furthermore, depending on vehicle and powertrain types, the implementation of MGE function could be very different. It is desired to have a structured approach for various vehicle applications’ MGE development. Lastly, good reliability of MGE does not always satisfy for complicated real-world driving maneuvers and road conditions.
This paper introduced a mature MGE development approach which utilizes an innovative Series Kalman Filter (S-KF) structure with a 3-axis accelerometer to address the challenges above, leading to the demonstration on 3 different types of vehicles with different powertrain applications: a truck with Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and Automated Manual Transmission (AMT) gearbox, a mid-size Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) SUV, and an A-segment Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) mini car. They are tested under wide range real-world driving maneuvers and road conditions. Moreover, to improve the converge time whilst keeping the same accuracy of MGE, several dedicated designed engineering features are implemented and introduced in this paper. The vehicle-based experimental result and structured development approach showed good performance and maturity of the production oriented MGE, and good efficiency and flexibility to adapt it to various applications.