Active vehicle suspension control using road preview model predictive control and radial basis function networks

Active suspension systems in road vehicles are applied in order to mitigate the road-induced chassis vertical accelerations more effectively than standard passive suspensions, thus increasing comfort and handling. Such systems are greatly assisted by road preview schemes, consisting of special sensors usually based on laser scanners (e.g. LiDAR sensors), which detect road irregularities ahead of the vehicle and feed this information to a control system, designed to manipulate the active suspension accordingly. In this paper, a model predictive controller (MPC) with road preview incorporating radial basis function (RBF) models, is presented as a control scheme for a full car active suspension system. The employed RBF models can efficiently approximate the nonlinear behavior of the suspension system, thus improving performance over linear MPC methods. Special care is taken to alleviate the increased computational complexity entailed in the RBF models, in order to ensure that online implementation of the controller is feasible. The proposed scheme is evaluated on a detailed simulated full car model under various road excitation types, while making use of a realistic approach for incorporating LiDAR road scanner noise. Comparisons to a passive suspension system, as well as a standard MPC controller with a fully linear plant model, demonstrate the performance potential of using RBF prediction models in a road preview MPC context.