Abstract
Abstract
Active control of vehicle suspensions has long been known as an effective way of enhancing isolation of unwanted vibrations. It is further shown in the literature that obtaining ‘preview’ information of the ‘future’ road inputs will result in smoother control with less control effort. Most of these studies assume perfect preview measurements. This paper is a simulation analysis to verify if the benefits of preview are valid in the presence of uncertainty. The optimal control scheme for preview control of a quarter-car suspension model is briefly presented, followed by numerical simulations. The analysis addresses two different possible sources of uncertainty in preview measurements. Comparison of the performance for various levels of uncertainty in the preview shows that noise/uncertainty can be an issue, with an adverse effect that sometimes increases with preview length. In other words, it is shown that controllers with longer preview can be more susceptible to noise. However, the limits of tolerable noise are not very restrictive, and the well-known benefits of preview can still be achieved if the measurement errors are maintained below a limited level.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.