Road profile identification using estimation techniques: comparison between independent component analysis and Kalman filter

This paper focuses on the identification of a road profile disturbance acting on vehicles. Vehicles are subjected to many kinds of excitation sources such as road profile irregularities, which constitute a major area of interest when designing suspension systems. Indeed, determining the road profile is important for passive suspension design on the one hand and for determining an appropriate control law for active suspensions on the other. Direct measurement techniques of the road profile are expensive, so solutions based on estimation theory are needed. The aim of this paper is to characterize the road excitation using the Independent Component Analysis (ICA). This proposed method can reconstruct original excitation sources by using physically measurable signals of the system under study. Here, the estimation of road disturbances is considered as output sources and identified from dynamic responses of the vehicle. These responses can be measured via sensors or can be numerically computed. In our case, they are numerically simulated using the Newmark method and consider different types of road profiles. The obtained results are validated after using a comparison with the Kalman filtering. The robustness of the ICA is confirmed via parametric study.