Abstract
Vehicle sideslip is an important input parameter that can be used to improve vehicle stability control. The sideslip angle is seen as a measure of vehicle lateral stability. This paper presents an inexpensive sideslip angle measurement algorithm which incorporates direct measurements and a kinematics-based model for sideslip estimation. The estimation algorithm uses Digital Image Correlation (DIC), to directly measure sideslip with a real-time sparse optical flow algorithm, and an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) to remove drift from the kinematics-based estimator. The method smooths the direct measurements from the DIC and other sensors while being independent of vehicle geometry.