Advances in Active Suspension Systems for Road Vehicles

Abstract

Active suspension systems (ASSs) have been proposed and developed for a few decades, and have now once again become a thriving topic in both academia and industry, due to the high demand for driving comfort and safety and the compatibility of ASSs with vehicle electrification and autonomy. Existing review papers on ASSs mainly cover dynamics modeling and robust control; however, the gap between academic research outcomes and industrial application requirements has not yet been bridged, hindering most ASS research knowledge from being transferred to vehicle companies. This paper comprehensively reviews advances in ASSs for road vehicles, with a focus on hardware structures and control strategies. In particular, state-of-the-art ASSs that have been recently adopted in production cars are discussed in detail, including the representative solutions of Mercedes active body control (ABC) and Audi predictive active suspension; novel concepts that could become alternative candidates are also introduced, including series active variable geometry suspension, and the active wheel-alignment system. ASSs with compact structure, small mass increment, low power consumption, high-frequency response, acceptable economic costs, and high reliability are more likely to be adopted by car manufacturers. In terms of control strategies, the development of future ASSs aims not only to stabilize the chassis attitude and attenuate the chassis vibration, but also to enable ASSs to cooperate with other modules (e.g., steering and braking) and sensors (e.g., cameras) within a car, and even with high-level decision-making (e.g., reference driving speed) in the overall transportation system—strategies that will be compatible with the rapidly developing electric and autonomous vehicles.

Keywords

• Active suspension
• Vehicle dynamics
• Robust control
• Ride comfort
• Chassis attitude