Segmented road grade estimation for fuel efficient heavy duty vehicles

Long haulage road transport consumes considerable amounts of energy in today's world. Predictive control strategies based on digital maps can significantly lower the portion being wasted in traditional cruise control operated highway driving. Such control strategies rely on high quality stored road grade information. This paper describes a newly developed method to estimate the road grade using sensors commonly found on standard heavy duty vehicles. The method utilizes a piecewise linear road model derived from highway design methodologies. The estimation method has been implemented and evaluated experimentally, and is shown to give better results compared to an existing method.