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As the active chassis technology becomes more and more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly important to have a repeatable and objective environment for testing to accelerate the deployment of active chassis control systems. Track testing is a highly subjective and expensive method for testing and validation of active chassis control algorithms. It is often difficult to recreate a critical condition that a vehicle chassis experiences within its possible operation range during track testing. Therefore an environment with capability to create a critical condition in a repeatable and objective manner is highly desirable. This paper presents a repeatable and objective method for developing as well as measuring performance of active chassis systems.

Vehicle ride comfort and handling demands conflicting design requirements from a vehicle suspension system. As a result, a passive vehicle suspension is incapable of providing the optimum performance for both ride and stability. A test set up is presented in this paper to enable a developer to test any given control algorithm on real-time hardware for an active vehicle suspension, and simulate quarter car performance characteristics. A quarter car model is developed in a host computer and then embedded in a target computer. The parameters of the quarter car are accessible for modification in host computer through TCP/IP connection with target computer. Ride and stability performance characteristics are calculated and also made available during HIL simulation. A controller including a DSP card works with a third computer, where the control system architecture can be edited and control parameters can be changed using a customizable graphical user interface.