The measurement of the rotational angle of the wheel is critical for the smart wheel force sensor (SWFS) to obtain the wheel forces defined in the vehicle coordinates. To simplify the structure of the SWFS and overcome the shortcomings of the traditional angular transducer, a new method to evaluate the rotational speed of the wheel and then calculate the rotational angle is proposed in this paper. In this method, the centripetal acceleration caused by the rotation is recorded by three accelerometers and used carefully. What's more, the possible sources of error are classified and analyzed. Simulations and stand experiment are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Keywords: accelerometer; error analysis; rotational angle measurement; wheel force sensor.