Simultaneous Input and State Estimation for Integrated Motor-Transmission Systems in a Controller Area Network Environment via an Adaptive Unscented Kalman Filter

As the requirements on powertrain efficiency of electric vehicles (EVs) are increasing, integrated motor-transmission (IMT) powertrain systems for EVs are becoming a promising solution. For the integration of IMT powertrain systems, the system state information and the actuator status are usually required for the closed-loop controller design or the on-board fault diagnosis. Embracing the demands, an observer for simultaneous estimation of input and system state of an IMT powertrain system is studied in this paper. It is well-known that controller area network (CAN) has been dominant in the vehicle network, which is used to communicate among controllers, sensors, and actuators. However, the CAN bus always induces time-varying delays when there are a number of communication nodes on the bus. The CAN-bus induced delay would result in vibrations in the vehicle powertrain or even deterioration of the entire closed-loop system. To deal with the CAN-bus induced delay in the estimation work for IMT powertrain systems, the potential random delays are considered in a three-state nonlinear model which represents the behavior of an IMT system. To estimate the input and state simultaneously, an adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) is adopted. As we know, the adopted AUKF has the benefits of dealing with system nonlinearities and calculating the noise covariance matrix automatically. Simulations and comparisons are carried out. We can see from the results that the proposed observer estimates the input and system state well. Moreover, the resulting estimation error is smaller comparing with the estimation error of the observer based on extended Kalman filter algorithm.