Control of the active suspension for wheeled vehicles.

Abstract

This paper describes a control system design of an active suspension system which is required for wheeled vehicles whose body height and direction should be kept constant while travelling over irregular terrains. The suspension system has a force generating actuator between the body and the wheel axis in parallel with a spring and a shock absorber. Assuming that the tires are rigid and the maintain contact with the terrain, a 2-wheeled 2 d. o. f. model is derived. Then, a sliding mode control method is applied to the model to control the relative body height to the terrain and the body pitch angle. simulation results show that the actively controlled suspension achieves better performance than the passive suspension and that the validity of the proposed sliding mode controller is vertified.