Predictive Time-Delay Control of Vehicle Suspensions

Abstract

A predictive control methodology is introduced for active vehicle suspension control, taking into account the effect of time delay as an inherent characteristic of active systems in the absence of preview information. In this method, at each time instant, the control signal is calculated by minimizing a perfor mance index, based on the predicted response in a finite prediction horizon. The discrete predictive method ology, compared with the widely used linear quadratic regulator method, is easier to formulate and results in a discrete-time control algorithm suitable for digital control, and time delays can be more easily introduced in the formulation. In this paper, predictive control simulation results are compared with passive control re sults. It is shown that this method is capable of improving ride performance of the single-degree-of-freedom quarter-car model for a wide range of input frequencies in the presence of time delay, while in the meantime it maintains the maximum suspension travel below the maximum of passively controlled suspensions.