Vehicle Semi-active Suspension Control with Cloud-based Road Information

Adaptive suspension control considering passenger comfort and stability of the vehicle has been researched intensively, thus several automotive companies already apply these technologies in their high-end models. Most of these systems react to the instantaneous effects of road irregularities, however, some expensive camera-based systems adapting the suspension in coherence with upcoming road conditions have already been introduced. Thereby, using oncoming road information the performance of adaptive suspension systems can be enhanced significantly. The emerging technology of cloud computing enables several promising features for road vehicles, one of which may be the implementation of an adaptive semi-active suspension system using historic road information gathered in the cloud database. The main novelty of the paper is the developed semi-active suspension control method in which Vehicle-to-Cloud-to-Vehicle technology serves as the basis for the road adaptation capabilities of the suspension system. The semi-active suspension control is founded on the Linear Parameter-Varying framework. The operation of the presented system is validated by a real data simulation in TruckSim simulation environment.