A Single-Sensor Control Strategy for Semi-Active Suspensions

The topic of this paper is the design and analysis of a control strategy for semi-active suspensions in road vehicles. Currently used closed-loop control strategies (like the Sky-Hook damping) require two sensors for each suspension. Typically, two accelerometers or an accelerometer combined with a stroke sensor are used. In this paper a simple but innovative algorithm is proposed, capable of providing quasi-optimal performance using a single accelerometer. The starting point of this work is the Mix-SH-ADD control algorithm, which has been recently developed and proposed. Starting from that idea, the single-sensor algorithm is derived. This algorithm pays a little performance price with respect to the mix SH-ADD algorithm, while guaranteeing cost-reduction and augmented reliability.