Unscented Kalman-filter to manage the handling-comfort trade-off of quarter-of-vehicle

This paper investigates managing the comfort-handling trade-off of a quarter car suspension system using a Kalman filter. Using the unscented Kalman filter, the adapted feedback input signal is extracted based on the vertical acceleration signals of the chassis and wheel. Considering the chassis acceleration signal as the primary feedback to maintain a required comfort level, it is continuously adapted to keep an acceptable level of road handling. Compared with the traditional methods, which rely on the combination of the two modes of comfort and handling through an intermediate variable to manage the contradiction, this method focuses on comfort and improves the process of the road handling automatically. The proposed strategy is evaluated using simulation in MATLAB and the results show the feasibility of this method in managing the handling-comfort trade-off. In addition, mathematical relationships that allow this control strategy to be derived were shown. Moreover, the effects of road disturbances amplitudes and road quality on the performance of the proposed control strategy were investigated. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is compared with that of the hybrid-hook and the results show the superiority of the proposed algorithm.