"Improving Safety, Comfort and Efficiency of Convoy Vehicles Through Novel Preview Control"

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Ride quality, active safety and energy efficiency of convoy vehicles will be improved through the use of preview-controlled active suspensions. Both ride quality and roadholding of actively-suspended vehicles (i.e., with a force actuator in the suspension system) can be improved by sensing the road ahead of the vehicle and using this information in a preview controller. Instead of vulnerable look-ahead sensors mounted on the front bumper of the vehicle, the overall response of the preceding vehicle(s) is proposed as a means to generate preview controller information for followers. In our proposed research controllers will be designed and simulated to assess performance, stability and robustness. Physical implementation will be done using reduced-scale vehicle hardware. Active suspensions also reduce the longitudinal energy lost to vertical suspension motion, thereby potentially reducing vehicle energy consumption. The reduction for vehicles with preview-active suspension and intelligent cruise control will be quantified through simulation. The use of lead-vehicle-as-sensor will then be applied to yaw and roll dynamics to improve handling and ride quality during cornering. Contributions to the research community include novel control schemes, robust estimators of difficult-to-measure vehicle states, and insight into energy interactions among vehicle system elements.