Learning to cooperatively estimate road surface friction

Abstract: We present a system for estimating the friction of the pavement surface at any curved road section, by arriving at a consensus estimate, based on data from vehicles that have recently passed through that section. This estimate can help following vehicles. To keep costs down, we depend only on standard automotive sensors, such as the IMU, and sensors for the steering angle and wheel speeds. Our system's workflow consists of: (i) processing of measurements from existing vehicular sensors, to implement a virtual sensor that captures the effect of low friction on the vehicle, (ii) transmitting short kinematic summaries from vehicles to a road side unit (RSU), using V2X communication, and (iii) estimating the friction coefficients, by running a machine learning regressor at the RSU, on summaries from individual vehicles, and then combining several such estimates. In designing and implementing our system over a road network, we face two key questions: (i) should each individual road section have a local friction coefficient regressor, or can we use a global regressor that covers all the possible road sections? and (ii) how accurate are the resulting regressor estimates? We test the performance of design variations of our solution, using simulations on the commercial package Dyna4. We consider a single vehicle type with varying levels of tyre wear, and a range of road friction coefficients. We find that: (a) only a marginal loss of accuracy is incurred in using a global regressor as compared to local regressors, (b) the consensus estimate at the RSU has a worst case error of about ten percent, if the combination is based on at least fifty recently passed vehicles, and (c) our regressors have root mean square (RMS) errors that are less than five percent. The RMS error rate of our system is half as that of a commercial friction estimation service.