Mixed Kinematics and Camera Based Vehicle Dynamic Sideslip Estimation for an RC Scaled Model

Vehicle side slip angle is at the basis of many vehicle dynamics control systems. Many methods are available to estimate side-slip angle using on board sensors (usually accelerometers and gyros). The technical advances pertaining autonomous vehicles made an additional kind of sensor available: cameras. This study develops a mixed kinematic vision-based side slip angle estimation. The proposed algorithm merges the information of a commercial grade inertial measurement system, wheel encoders and information from a camera. The camera measurement are integrated in a Kalman filter observer. The paper implements and tests the approach on an instrumented RC scale vehicle, comparing the proposed approach against a kinematic based estimation. Experimental results show a decrease of a factor between 2 and 10 (depending on the type of maneuver) of the estimation mean squared error.