Affordable Road Obstacle Detection and Active Suspension Control Using Inertial and Motion Sensors

The electrification trend characterizing the current automotive industry creates opportunities for the implementation of innovative functionalities, enhancing aspects of energy efficiency and vehicle dynamics. Active vehicle suspensions are an important subsystem in this process. To enable proper suspension control, vehicle sensors can be used to measure the system’s response and, in some cases, preview the road conditions and the presence of possible obstacles. When assessing the performance of a suspension system, the speed bump crossing represents a challenging maneuver. A suitable trade-off between comfort and road holding must be found through different phases of the profile. The proposed work uses a fixed-gain observer obtained from Kalman filtering to identify road unevenness and adapt the control strategy when the vehicle travels through a bump. To this end, the obstacle is identified through the use of affordable sensors available in high-end vehicles: accelerometers, inertial measurement units, and stroke sensors. The proposed technique is also affordable from the computational point of view, thus enabling its use in common microprocessors tailored for the automotive field. The bump identification technique is validated through experimental data captured in a vehicle demonstrator. Subsequently, numerical results show that the proposed technique is able to enhance comfort while keeping road holding and attenuating the transient after taking the bump.