magic formula tyre tool

2 minutes reading time

Today I want to briefly advertise a GUI I created for semi-empirical Magic Formula tire modeling. The tool has been featured on the Student Lounge MathWorks blog. It is open-source and available for free on GitHub!

Concept

A few months ago I had already open-sourced my Magic Formula Tyre Library on GitHub. It is a collection of MATLAB classes and functions for Magic Formula Tyre modeling. You can read *.tir files, evaluate imported tire models and fit them automatically to test-bench data.

The concept of this new tool is to ease the use of those library functions by creating a graphical layer to interact with. The functions to evaluate, fit and export in the tool are the same as in the library. This guarantees same results when evaluating the models outside and inside the tool.

This project originated in my work in Formula Student, where we required a detailed tire model for control and estimation purposes. In the past few weeks I have polished the app to make it useable by a broader audience. If you are also participating in Formula Student (FSAE), you might find benefit in this tool.

Examples

For a detailed walk-through, please check out this blog post on the MathWorks Student Lounge. It describes in detail how you can go from raw test-bench data (in this case from the FSAE TTC) to a model that can calculate FX and FY for combined slip conditions in a matter of minutes. You can along the example as the test-bench data is provided in an obscured form. Here I will provide only a short summary of the most relevant features.

The main feature is the fitting algorithm. Import your test-bench data and adjust the settings. You can set initial values and min/max boundaries for all fittable parameters and then let fmincon do the rest.

Fitting tire model to data

After having fitted your model, you can evaluate the model-data-fit by using the plotting capabilities of the tool.

Plotting tire model vs. data

If you are not happy with the fitted results, you can either try adjusting the min/max and initial value settings for each parameter. Or you can edit the model directly with live feedback.

Manually editing tire model parameters

Installation

Please follow the installation instructions on GitHub. There you will be redirected either to the current release or the latest version on MathWorks’ FileExchange.

Conclusion

If you have any questions, find any bugs or have feature suggestions, please make use of the repository’s GitHub Issues.

In case the tool has helped you in any way, consider giving my repository a Star or rating it on FileExchange. That keeps me motivated to add features to the tool.

Last modified on: 29 Jun 2022 01:08. Reason: SEO optimization.