A Comfort-Oriented Control Strategy for Semi-Active Suspension based on Half Car Model

This paper is devoted to the design of a novel semi-active comfort-oriented control strategy based on the "half-car" modeling of the vehicle. The half car model is an effective description of the vertical behaviors in a vehicle like a motorcycle, since it is able to represent both the heave and pitch dynamics. A recent control strategy (the "Mix-1-Sensor") have been proven to be the quasi-optimal control strategy when the system is described with a quarter car model and the comfort objective is the control goal. This paper presents an analysis of the performances of the Mix-1-Sensor implemented in a half car: this strategy is able to guarantee a quasi optimal performance in terms of heave dynamics but it is not able to manage the pitch dynamics efficiently. A pitch-oriented extension of this strategy is proposed in order to guarantee a better filtering of the pitch dynamics.