A muscular-like compliance control for active vehicle suspension

Inspired by the natural suspension capabilities in the biological limb system, a design of an active suspension system is developed for damping the undesired forces and displacements caused to vehicles by the irregularity on the road surface. The proposed controller for suspension is based on a muscular-like model fitted from the responses of different voluntary and involuntary limb movements. Because the muscular-like model emulates the property of biological damping behavior, the proposed active suspension controller has a very unique feature that will enable the controlled vehicle to adapt to varying loads and sudden impacting forces. This is in contrast to the conventional linear controller that has sensitivity and stability problems when the dynamic system is subjected to varying loads. To realize our controller, a small-scale, quarter-car model was built for our experiments on active suspension.