Methodology for Getting a 7 Degree of Freedom Vehicular Model for Active Suspension Control System Design

This work shows a methodology that provide a practical way to get a vehicular mathematical model with 7 degrees of freedom from experimental data, such as signals of body acceleration and relative displacement of suspension. This model is intended to be used for provide the control algorithm for an active suspension system. The work also describes the development process applied to get it. In this process was used a full vehicular simulator software (Callas) in the development phase, speeding up the feedback looping for fixing errors and making improvements. Only afterwards, with the methodology matured and virtually validated, the tests on a real vehicle were implemented for a final validation of the methodology. The use of a full vehicle simulation software resulted in a shorter development time and a lower cost than conventional similar procedures. The methodology proposed, which use a optimization algorithm based on sequential quadratic programming (SQP), shows to be a very effective process to get a low order model able to represent the real vehicle behavior with good accuracy, which is very suitable for control applications.