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The vehicle pull problem is very important to driving safety. Major factors that may cause the pull problem related to tire include variations of geometric dimension (e.g. RPK) and stiffness (e.g. cornering stiffness, aligning stiffness), plysteer and conicity. In previous research, the influencing mechanism of these factors was well studied. But in fact, vehicle pull problem caused by tire is probabilistic. When we assemble four tires onto the car, there could be 384 different assembly arrangements. If there are significant differences among these four tires, there will also be significant differences in the influence of different tire assembly schemes on vehicle pull, which has not been systematically discussed in previous studies. If we want to evaluate the pull performance of all these arrangements by vehicle test, it will be a time consuming process which will take almost 24 working days, along with a high test expense.

In this paper, an intelligent tire system is designed to estimate tire force by detecting the tire carcass deformation. The intelligent tire system includes a set of marker points on the inner liner of the tire to locate the position of tire carcass and a camera mounted on the rim to capture the position of these points under different driving conditions. An image recognition program is used to identify the coordinates of the marker points in order to determine the deformation of the tire carcass. According to the tire carcass stiffness test and the general tire carcass deformation theory, an approximate linear relationship between tire force and carcass deformation in all directions was obtained. The vertical force of the tire is determined by the distance between adjacent marker points. The longitudinal force and lateral force of the tire are estimated by measuring the longitudinal and lateral displacements of the marker points.