Optimal and Suboptimal Linear Active Suspensions for Road Vehicles

SUMMARY By employing acceleration feedback a body spring of arbitary stiffness may be incorporated in an active suspension design without loss of optimality. Furthermore, as a practical simplification the necessary body position feedback may be measured relative to the axle rather than to the road. This entails only a slight loss in performance and results in a suboptimal system with a simplified feedback structure. The effects of the performance index weighting factors on the eigenvalues of the optimal system are discussed.