Ride Comfort Improvement Through Preview Active Suspension Control With Speed Planning

The development of vehicle intelligence and connectivity provides the opportunity to integrate more road information for vehicle control. This article proposes a preview active suspension control method based on model predictive control (MPC) with the aim of suppressing vertical vibration. A key challenge in implementing MPC lies in the heavy computational burden associated with solving Quadratic Programming (QP) problems. To address this, a QP algorithm based on non-negative least squares (NNLS) is utilized to accelerate the controller solving speed, thereby enhancing its practical feasibility. Additionally, to further improve ride comfort, a speed planning method is developed. This method addresses a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP) incorporating both travel time and comfort, then a feasible solution is chosen from the optimal solution set according to passenger preferences. Various experiment and simulation results are provided to validates the effectiveness of the controller, speed planning and the integrated design of both. Compared with traveling at a constant speed, the proposed speed planning method decreases the RMS value of body vertical acceleration by 17.3% while concurrently achieving shorter travel time.