A simulation study on visual preview control of vehicle magnetorheological suspension

Abstract At present, the boom in intelligent vehicles, especially automotives, has brought magnetorheological (MR hereinafter) suspensions into further focus. Generally, traditional MR suspensions work with acceleration sensors to respond with a non-negligible time delay issue due to the inductive property of MR damper (MRD hereinafter), which hinders their full performance especially at high-speed driving with a powerless ‘blind zone’. To address this issue, this study proposes a simulation study on visual preview control for vehicle MR suspension based on model predictive control, since the road preview is able to compensate the time delay due to the future road information perceived in advance. First, a camera with a computer vision algorithm is employed to preview road information of target type, target size and distance to wheels. Besides, the error correction of radial and tangential distortions of camera lens are investigated, and the trajectory of wheels are predicted by a cycloid model because MR suspension only needs to respond to the road targets that the wheels will pass over. Further, the area in front of the vehicle is divided into a recognition zone and action zone, and the road targets within action zone (<1.5 m) are calculated more precisely for a prepared immediate response from the MR suspension. Then, the performance of a simulating vehicle MR suspension is investigated through a joint simulation by the automotive simulation software CarSim and the model-solving Simulink. The evident results show that the MR suspension with visual preview control performs the best in ride comfort (mean square values of sprung mass acceleration is 82% and 52% lower compared to a passive suspension and a MR suspension with skyhook control, respectively). Therefore, the visual preview control strategy of MR suspension is able to enhance the performance on the discrete road conditions.