Switching control of semi-active suspension based on road profile estimation

Abstract

The road condition is complex and variable during driving; hence, the suspension system cannot easily suppress the vertical vibration of the vehicle. To effectively improve the vehicle dynamic performance under different road conditions, this study proposes a switching control strategy for the semi-active suspension based on the road profile estimation. First, the mapping relationship between different driving conditions and requirements of vehicle dynamic performances is studied. Then, a switching controller with multiple sub-controllers is designed on the basis of the modified skyhook control. The optimal control gains are obtained by adopting the cuckoo search algorithm. In addition, to realise the automatic switching of the controller under different road conditions, an online road profile estimation method, including road disturbance estimation and road roughness classification, is developed. Bench test results show that the proposed control algorithm has an obvious effect on improving the vehicle ride comfort and handling performance, which verifies the effectiveness of the road estimation results and the superiority of the switching control strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Semi-active suspension
• switching control
• road profile estimation
• parameter optimisation
• vehicle dynamic performance

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the assistance of staff in the Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Automotive Engineering.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this paper was fully supported by the National Natural Science Foundation Project, China [Project 51975253, 51575240], Natural Science Research Project, Jiangsu [Project 20KJB580004].