Optimal traction control for heavy-duty vehicles

Heavy-duty vehicles such as tractors, bulldozers, certain construction and municipal vehicles, soil millers, forestry machinery etc. have a high demand for propulsion force and consequently a high fuel consumption. The current work presents a traction control approach based on motion dynamics estimation for optimizing propulsion force and energy efficiency according to a user-defined strategy. Unscented Kalman filter augmented with a fuzzy-logic system for adaptive estimation is used as the state observer. Simulation case study with an electrically driven tractor is presented. The new method of traction control showed considerable improvement of balancing energy efficiency and propulsion force.