A Tool for Control Algorithm Development of an Active Vehicle Suspension Using Hardware-in-The-Loop

Vehicle ride comfort and handling demands conflicting design requirements from a vehicle suspension system. As a result, a passive vehicle suspension is incapable of providing the optimum performance for both ride and stability. A test set up is presented in this paper to enable a developer to test any given control algorithm on real-time hardware for an active vehicle suspension, and simulate quarter car performance characteristics. A quarter car model is developed in a host computer and then embedded in a target computer. The parameters of the quarter car are accessible for modification in host computer through TCP/IP connection with target computer. Ride and stability performance characteristics are calculated and also made available during HIL simulation. A controller including a DSP card works with a third computer, where the control system architecture can be edited and control parameters can be changed using a customizable graphical user interface.