Feel-tire Unina: Development and Modeling of a Sensing System for Intelligent Tires

Paper in proceeding, 2019

In recent years, a great deal of research has been devoted to develop intelligent tire concepts, aiming at increasing the effectiveness of the active safety system of ground vehicles. There are several areas of improvement regarding intelligent tires; among them, the possibility of correlating information provided by sensors with tire dynamics. However, many approaches are based on regression algorithms which need a large amount of data to be collected and can easily lead to misinterpretations due to the non-full-physical nature of the proposed methods. In this paper, the use of a cost-effective flex sensor for intelligent tire applications is presented. The proposed technology is based on a flexible ring tire model (FRTM) able to estimate the tire circumferential strain due to different load conditions. The flex sensor has been also combined with a a wireless data transmission and a suitable prototype has been realized. Also, a simplified analytical expression for describing the tire curvature according to the applied load has been derived in closed-form. Experimental results have been finally analyzed by employing the FRTM and an analytical procedure for correlating the tire curvature with the voltage outputs provided by the flex sensor is discussed.