Design of an active suspension controller with simple vehicle models

This paper presents a method to design a controller for active suspension with 1-DOF decoupled models. Three 1-DOF decoupled models describing vertical, roll and pitch motions are used to design a controller in order to generate a vertical force, roll and pitch moments, respectively. These control inputs are converted into active suspension forces with geometric relationship. To design a controller, a sliding mode control is adopted. Frequency domain analysis and simulation on vehicle simulation software, CarSim®, show that the proposed method is effective for ride comfort.