Estimation of Road Disturbance for a Non Linear Half Car Model Using the Independent Component Analysis

The identification of the road profile disturbance acting on a vehicle was the objective of many recent researches. This estimation remains very interesting since it contributes to study the dynamic behavior of the vehicle in one side and to choose a control law later in other side. However most of the used techniques have many drawbacks such us those based on direct measurements of the profile which need costly profilometers or those based on neural network algorithm which are very complicated. So the purpose of this research is to use a new method named the Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to estimate the road profile. This method is based on the so-called inverse problem. So it necessitates only the knowledge of the dynamic responses of the vehicle to identify the road disturbance. Therefore the Newmark algorithm is used in this paper to extract the dynamic responses of the system under study which is a non linear half car model. Starting from these responses, the ICA algorithm is applied. The validation of the obtained results is done using some performance criteria which are the relative error and the MAC number. Finally a good agreement is found between the original profile and the estimated one.