A Novel Method for the Reconstruction of Road Profiles from Measured Vehicle Responses Based on the Kalman Filter Method

The estimation of the disturbance input acting on a vehicle from its given responses is an inverse problem. To overcome some of the issues related to ill-posed inverse problems, this work proposes a method of reconstructing the road roughness based on the Kalman filter method. A half-car model that considers both the vehicle and equipment is established, and the joint input-state estimation method is used to identify the road profile. The capabilities of this methodology in the presence of noise are numerically demonstrated. Moreover, to reduce the influence of the driving speed on the estimation results, a method of choosing the calculation frequency is proposed. A road vibration test is conducted to benchmark the proposed method.