With a growing demand for improved fuel efficiency and reduced emissions, lightweight vehicles have gained strong attention in current automotive industry. This paper discusses the development of a brake system for a lightweight vehicle that has significant weight variations. A conventional brake system was first designed and its performance was assessed. In order to improve the brake efficiency and prevent wheel lockup under all loading cases, antilock brake system (ABS) is proposed in which a wheel slip controller based on sliding mode control and a solenoid valve actuator is modeled. In the wheel slip controller, Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) was used to monitor the brake forces and a pulse width modulation (PWM) technique was applied to control the solenoid valve. The overall brake performance was evaluated through simulation of 8 DOF nonlinear vehicle model. The proposed brake system showed significant improvement in brake efficiency.
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