A Suspension Control Strategy for Improving Ride Comfort of High-Performance Vehicles

In order to achieve a better compromise between handling and comfort requirements a control strategy for active suspension systems is presented in this paper. The control logic tries to decouple the vehicle body motions of heave, roll and pitch (thus a modal control is implemented), so that is possible to act on each of them separately directly according to the driver demands. The results of this controller have been compared with the ones of a feedback regulator based on the optimal control theory (LQR) aimed at minimizing the derivative of the state vector instead of the state vector itself (RSS framework). Simulations results stated that significant improvements of ride comfort can be achieved respect to passive shock absorbers and that the performances of the control strategies are comparable.