Investigation of the comfort improvements by an integrated chassis control strategy

Abstract: Autonomous driving is one of the megatrends in today’s automotive industry. Passengers are expected to do more non-driving tasks in an autonomous driving vehicle. Therefore, the comfort of the vehicle has become a more important factor for the passengers. This thesis investigates the possibility of increasing comfort through an integrated active chassis control strategy. First, this thesis has defined comfort in objective ways. Then, the objective comfort evaluation variables are used for comfort evaluation of the vehicle in different scenarios. The improvement in comfort is evaluated for four active chassis systems, including active suspension, active anti-roll bar, active rear-wheel steering and torque vectoring systems. Since more than one active chassis system can affect vehicle body motion in one direction, those four active chassis systems should be controlled in an integrated way. The model predictive control (MPC) is used because it can control a multi-input multi-output system in an optimized way. Two MPC controllers have been developed in this thesis to control multiple active chassis systems for comfort improvement. The original MPC controller is a linear MPC controller that uses a time-invariant state-space vehicle model. The adaptive MPC controller is a linear MPC controller that uses a time-variant state-space vehicle model. These two controllers are tested in the simulation software CarMaker with various scenarios, such as slalom, double lane-change, and bumps that are both symmetrical and shifted unsymmetrical. Finally, the simulation results are evaluated with objective comfort evaluation methods to assess the controller performances in comfort improvement. In conclusion, the model predictive control can be a feasible way to improve comfort with multiple active chassis systems. The simulation results show that the two MPC controllers can reduce the objective comfort evaluation variables. The discussions of the design process and simulation results point out future works that need to be done before this project becomes a product of real vehicles.