Incremental Model Predictive Control of Active Suspensions With Estimated Road Preview Information From a Lead Vehicle

Abstract In preview-based vehicle suspension applications, the preview of the road profile is highly dependent on the preview sensors. In some scenarios such as heavy traffic situations, the preview of road profile can only be estimated by other vehicles because the view of the preview sensors may be blocked by other vehicles. The estimated preview road information can contain errors, which thus requires the controller to have a good robust performance. In this paper, an incremental model predictive control (MPC) strategy for active suspension systems along with a road profile estimator using preview information from a lead vehicle is proposed. The efficacy of the proposed strategy is experimentally validated on two scaled-down active suspension stations with comparison to two conventional active suspension control approaches.