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On the Regenerative Capabilities

Layne Clemen
Hyundai Center of Excellence in Vehicle
Dynamic Systems and Control,
of Electrodynamic Dampers
Department of Mechanical and
Aeronautical Engineering,
University of California,
Using Bond Graphs and Model
Davis, CA 95616
e-mail: laclemen@ucdavis.edu
Predictive Control
Olugbenga Moses Anubi There is a constant interest in the performance capabilities of active suspensions without
GE Global Research Center, the associated shortcomings of degraded fuel economy. To this effect, electrodynamic
Niskayuna, NY 12309 dampers are currently being researched as a means to approach the performance of a
e-mail: anubimoses@gmail.com fully active suspension with minimal or no energy consumption. This paper investigates
the regenerative capabilities of these dampers during fully active operation for a range
Donald Margolis of controller typesemphasizing road holding, ride, and energy regeneration. A model
Professor of an electrodynamic suspension is developed using bond graphs. Two model predictive
Hyundai Center of Excellence in Vehicle controllers (MPCs) are constructed: standard and frequency-weighted MPCs. The result-
Dynamic Systems and Control, ing controlled system is subjected to International Organization for Standardization (ISO)
Department of Mechanical and roads AD and the results are presented. For all of the standard MPC weightings, the sus-
Aeronautical Engineering, pension was able to recover more energy than is required to run the suspension actively.
University of California, All of the results for optimal energy regeneration occurred on the standard Pareto tradeoff
Davis, CA 95616 curve for ride comfort and road holding. Frequency weighting the controller increased sus-
e-mail: dlmargolis@ucdavis.edu pension performance while also regenerating 312% more energy than the standard MPC.
[DOI: 10.1115/1.4032505]

1 Introduction control [6], which differs from the algorithms in this paper that are re-
generative and always fully active during operation. Non-MPC algo-
Active suspension control has been studied for many years; how-
rithms have also been investigated, such as multiobjective algorithms
ever, it is seldom implemented on commuter vehicles due to the
like that designed by Iorio and Casavola [7], which allowed the de-
decrease in fuel economy and additional system cost. Electrodynamic
signer to emphasize either energy harvesting or ride comfort. In this
dampers have the potential to alleviate the fuel economy issue. This
paper, a model of an electrodynamic quarter-car suspension is devel-
paper explores the capacity of an electrodynamic damper to operate
oped using bond graph techniques and discretized for utilization in
as a fully active suspension while being able to dissipate energy into
MPC. Standard and frequency-weighted MPCs are developed with
a storage element such as a supercapacitor or battery. Previous stud-
additional constraints to guarantee stability when energy is included
ies have shown that active suspensions require power during 2030%
in the cost function. The model is then subjected to random road
of operation while dissipating power the rest of the time [1]. Because
inputs for class AD ISO roadways and the results are analyzed. It is
of this, a damper that can scavenge energy should be able to regener-
found that both MPCs have the capabilities of regenerating more
ate enough energy to run an active suspension without degrading fuel
energy than is required for an active suspension while increasing the
economy of a vehicle. In this paper, the capabilities of an electrody-
road holding and ride comfort of the vehicle. The frequency-
namic suspension to both perform active ride control, road holding,
weighted controller was able to increase the ride comfort and road
and energy regeneration are investigated. The focus of the controller
holding beyond the standard MPC controller while also regenerating
is on the tradeoff between road holding, ride comfort, and now
slightly more energy.
energy regeneration. Because of the addition of energy as a control
The motivation for this paper is to further the understanding of
consideration, MPC was chosen as the control design for this study.
how the control objectives of an electrodynamic suspension affect
Other control techniques, such as proportionalintegralderivative or
the ability of the actuator to harvest energy and vice versa.
linear quadratic regulation (LQR), do not feature simple ways to
Through the use of MPC, it is demonstrated that for an active
incorporate energy regeneration as a control objective, making MPC
linear quarter-car suspension, under all modes of operation, the
a good candidate for this study. MPC has been used in suspension
energy harvested and optimal suspension control occurred on the
control studies for many years. Earlier studies successfully coupled
Pareto front that characterizes the optimal tradeoff between road
MPC with road preview information to increase suspension perform-
holding and ride comfort. This suggests that additional considera-
ance in ride comfort and road holding [2]. Other applications of MPC
tions for energy regeneration are not necessarily required and that
in active suspensions include calculating semi-active control laws
optimal energy regeneration occurs in a standard active suspen-
[3]. As usual, MPC faces implementation issues in real suspension
sion tradeoff between ride comfort and road holding. The rest of
control due to computation time. This was addressed by the imple-
the paper is organized as follows: a standard quarter-car model
mentation of a fast algorithm by Canale et al. [4], which showed
with an electrodynamic actuator in place of the passive damper is
these algorithms to be both implementable and improve vehicle per-
developed using bond graph techniques. Next, standard and
formance. MPC was successfully used to study the ride comfort and
frequency-weighted MPCs are constructed for simulation. Results
energy regeneration tradeoffs in a regenerative vehicle suspension
of the simulations are presented and finally conclusions and sug-
[5] and has also been used by Huang et al. to accomplish what they
gestions for future work are discussed.
dubbed consumptive fully active and regenerative semi-active

Contributed by the Dynamic Systems Division of ASME for publication in the 2 System Model
JOURNAL OF DYNAMIC SYSTEMS, MEASUREMENT, AND CONTROL. Manuscript received
June 16, 2015; final manuscript received December 14, 2015; published online Suspension control is generally done by utilizing passive, semi-
March 10, 2016. Assoc. Editor: Fu-Cheng Wang. active, or active elements at the corners of a vehicle. The system

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model used in this study follows a standard quarter-car but with  
Jm kt ks b pus ps T=arm
an electrodynamic actuator in place of the passive damper. A dia- p_ s qt q s   ms g (4)
gram of the electrodynamic actuator used in this study is shown in amus rm2 a arm2 mus ms ic
Fig. 1. The actuator is comprised of all of the components that are
acted upon by vs and vus in the diagram below. This actuator mus ms Jm mus ms rm2
a (5)
model is comprised of a direct current (DC) motor attached to a mus ms rm2
rack and pinion that is acted upon by the differential velocity
between the sprung and unsprung masses. The mechanical energy The models used in previous work [1,5] did not include latent
available through this differential velocity is converted to electri- damping in the system or any electrical resistance. A sensitivity
cal energy via the DC motor after which the energy is dissipated study on the affect of the motor parameters [9] on system perform-
through the winding resistance and potentially stored in a device ance showed that the amount of latent friction in the system will
such as a supercapacitor. The rectification and storage are repre- affect the harvesting capabilities of the electrodynamic damper, so
sented by the current source (ic). This simplification has been it was included in this model. To further the understanding of the
made because this study is interested in the amount of energy regenerative capabilities of the electrodynamic damper, motor
available for harvesting under differing control objectives. The winding resistance has also been included in the model. These ele-
resulting bond graph [8] of Fig. 1 is shown in Fig. 2. Note that de- ments are both resistive and will dissipate power in the system,
rivative causality appears in this model on the motor inertia. This thereby affecting the regenerative capabilities of the electrodynamic
bond graph model is easily incorporated into a standard quarter- damper. These two elements are what affect the regenerative effi-
car model. The resulting diagram is shown in Fig. 3. To obtain the ciency of the DC motor. It is not known what characterizes the in-
equations of motion for the system, the bond graph in Fig. 4 was ternal damping in the system as the actual damping value will
created by replacing the standard linear damper in the quarter-car require testing of the physical apparatus. Even so, the linear ele-
with the electrodynamic actuator model seen above. The equa- ment is suitable for studying the viability of this system. If the
tions of motion are easily obtained and are shown in Eqs. (1)(5). states are taken around equilibrium, the resulting equations can be
This is done through standard bond graph equation of motion for-
mulation. The state variables are the time derivative of momen-
tum of system inertias and displacements of system compliances,
represented by either a pi or qj, respectively. The only difficulty in
equation formulation results from derivative causality that occurs
on the motor moment of inertia. This leads to equations that are
slightly more complicated than a standard quarter-car model. In
this model, the tire spring and suspension displacements have
been assumed to be positive in compression.
pus
q_ t vi t  (1)
mus
   
Jm ms rm2 kt ks b pus ps
p_ us qt  qs  
ams rm2 a arm2 mus ms
T
 ic  mus g (2)
arm

pus ps
q_ s  (3)
mus ms

Fig. 3 Quarter-car model with electrodynamic damper

Fig. 1 Electrodynamic actuator diagram

Fig. 2 Electrodynamic actuator bond graph Fig. 4 Total system bond graph

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Table 1 System Parameters Pmotor is negative, energy is being supplied to the system, and if
it is positive, energy is being removed. While the reduction in effi-
Parameter Symbol Value ciency due to the latent damping does not enter this equation
directly, the performance is reduced by the difference in system
Unsprung Mass mus 66.3 kg states that affect the instantaneous power of the motor.
Sprung Mass ms 331.4 kg
Tire Stiffness kt 1.67  105 N=m
Suspension Stiffness ks 2.04  104 N=m 3 Control Algorithms
Pinion Radius rm 0.013 m
Motor Moment of Inertia Jm 7.33  105 kg  m2 Standard control design of a quarter-car active suspension does
Motor Constant T 1 N  m=A not allow for straightforward control of power or energy output of
Motor Damping b 0.0295 kg  m2=s the actuators. MPC offers a potential solution but has other issues
Motor Winding Resistance Rw 0.5 X associated with design. Primarily, power is a nonconvex cost
Gravity g 9.81 m=s2 function making implementation difficult. In this section, two
predictive controllers are designed to assess the performance of
the electrodynamic damper. In Sec. 3.1, a standard MPC is
written in standard linear form. Further, dividing Eqs. (2) and (4) designed and the horizon choice is presented that makes the cost
by mus and ms, respectively, yields equations of the form functions convex. Further, a Lyapunov constraint is added to guar-
antee system stability. In Sec. 3.2, the sprung mass acceleration
_ Axt But Bw wt
xt (6) is frequency-shaped to de-emphasize vibrations outside of the
T bandwidth of human sensation. This is paired with the dissipative
x qt vus qs vs  (7)
constraint to further enhance the ability of the suspension to iso-
u ic (8) late the driver as well as harvest energy.
w vi (9)
3.1 Standard MPC With Contractive Constraint. MPC
where qt is the tire deflection, qt is the suspension deflection, vus is with linear differential equations follows a standard optimization
the unsprung mass velocity, vs is the sprung mass velocity, ic is formulation at each time step as follows:
motor current, and vi is the road input velocity. Latent friction
in the system has been included in this model by a linear min JX; U (13a)
u0 ;;uN1
damping term that acts upon the motor inertia. A damping ratio of
f 0:035 was chosen as the damping ratio of the sprung mass subject to xk1 Ad xk Bd uk (13b)
caused by the latent friction. Values were not available from test-
ing for this parameter and this was deemed a good approximation x0 xt (13c)
for the friction in the mechanical components. To obtain a value
for the latent damping (b), the second-order frequency relation- xk 2 X for k 2 f0; 1; ; N  1g (13d)
ship between vs and vus (Eq. (10)) is used
uk 2 U (13e)
vs ss2 2fxn s x2n vus sx2n (10)
xN 2 X f (13f )
where 2fxn b=ams rm2 and x2n ks =ams .
Because this is a theoretical study on the capabilities of the where X x0 ; x1 ; ; xN , U u0, u1, , uN1, X is the polyhedra
electrodynamic damper to harvest energy during active operation, of state constraints, U is the polyhedra of input constraints, and
model uncertainty has not been taken into account but will be in X f is the polyhedron that the final state xN must lie in the inte-
future control studies. The parameters used in the simulations of rior of.
this study reflect those of a commuter sedan and a motor such as The cost functions that are utilized in this paper seek to opti-
Anaheim Automation-BLK421S-310V-3000 [10]. These parame- mize ride comfort, road holding, and maximize power out of the
ters can be seen in Table 1. system.2 The cost functions of interest are
Implementation of MPC requires the discrete representation of
the system in the form 1 1XN1
J1 xTN PxN a2 k21 q2t;k k22 q2s;k (14)
2 2 k0 s;k
xk1 Ad xk Bd uk Bw;d wk (11)
N 1 
X 
Tic;k
where the subscript d denotes the discrete system matrices. The J2 Rw i2c;k vs;k  vus;k (15)
rm
state-space model was discretized using the zero-order hold k0
method [11] resulting in a system that can be implemented in dis- J3 qJ1 J2 (16)
crete optimization. Zero-order hold was used as the discretization
method because it preserves a one-to-one relationship between the where
continuous system states and the discrete system states, while as Cas x Das u (17)
other methods, such as the Tustin transformation, do not.
The power that is supplied or removed by the motor is easily qt Cqt x (18)
found by taking the product of the voltage and current on the flow qs Cqs x (19)
source bond that represents the current supply. This results in the
following equation:  
Jm kt b ks b
Tic Cas  (20)
Pmotor 2
vus  vs  Rw ic (12) ams mus rm2 ams rm2 ams ams rm2
rm
This equation can be integrated over time to find the total amount Cqt 1 0 0 0  (21)
of energy that is regenerated during operation.1 In this equation, if

1 2
Early in the study, it was found that the ratio of T=rm =Rw significantly affects By minimizing the integral of the power supplied by the electrodynamic damper
the regenerative capabilities of the electrodynamic damper. over the prediction horizon, the harvested energy is maximized.

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Cqs 0 0 1 0  (22) The matrix, P, in Eq. (32) is the solution of the discrete algebraic
Ricatti equation (DARE). Provided that the pair (Ad, Bd) is con-
T trollable, the existence of such a P is guaranteed. Consequently, in
Das
ams rm the presence of input constraints, there exists at least one
uk R BTd PBd 1 BTd PAd xk such that Eq. (32) holds; thus, the
The cost function J1 is a standard discrete quadratic cost func- feasibility of the problem is guaranteed [15].
tion composed of ride comfort, represented by the sprung mass Remark 1. While Ref. [15] does not directly handle state con-
acceleration as , road holding, represented by the tire deflection straints, Eq. (46) in Ref. [15] enables the implicit handling of state
qt , and suspension deflection (qs) [12]. Inclusion of the suspen- constraints through proper selection of the weighting matrix P.
sion deflection qs is to help keep the suspension within an Further, in this study, no feasibility issues were seen. If one were
acceptable range of operation. This cost function is easily cast as concerned with this as a possibility, two options exist:
an LQR cost of the form (1) Implement the state constraints as soft constraints using
1 1XN1 slack variables.
J1 xTN PxN xT Qxk 2xTk Nuk uTk Ruk (23) (2) Require the final state, in this case x1, to be in the maximal
2 2 k0 k positive invariant set, O1 , which guarantees recursive
where feasibility.
If any horizon except 1 is used, Eq. (32) becomes a nonconvex
Q CTk Ck (24) constraint, and further, considerations are required to convexify it.
Further, the terminal state cost (xTN PxN ) is included in J1 and P is
N CTk D (25) the solution of the infinite-horizon DARE (Eq. (33)), the MPC
will converge to the LQR solution for a horizon of 1 when there
R DT D (26) are no state or input constraints [14]

Ck CTas k1 CTqt k2 CTqs T (27) 0 AT PA  P  AT PBR BT PB1 BT PA Q (33)

 T Due to the two facts above, a horizon of 1 was chosen as the basis
T
D 0 0 (28) for comparison of all the controllers that result from the various
ams rm combinations of k1, k2, and q for the cost function, J3.
Combining all of the constraints and cost functions results in
where xTN PxN is the terminal state cost and P is chosen by the the following MPC algorithm:
designer.
The cost function J2 seeks to maximize the energy harvested min Jx0 ; x1 ; ic;0 (34a)
from the system, and J3 implements a weighted sum of J1 and J2 u0
with weight q. It is important to note that implementation of J1 is
straightforward in MPC because it is a convex function but J2 and subject to x1 Ad x0 Bd u0 (34b)
J3 are more complicated because they are both nonconvex func-
tions. However, choosing a prediction horizon of 1 convexifies J2 x0 xt (34c)
and J3. This is the chosen prediction horizon for comparison as
outlined later. When the horizon of 1 is applied to Eq. (16), it qs;1  qs (34d)
becomes
qh i Tic;0 ic  ic;k  ic (34e)
J3 xT1 Px1 a2s;0 k1 q2t;0 k2 q2s;0 Rw i2c;0 vs;0  vus;0
2 rm
kx1 k2P  kx0 k2P  0 (34f )
(29)
where Jx0 ; x1 ; u0 is J1, J2, or J3.
The cost function above is implemented with the rattle space and
input constraints
3.2 Frequency-Shaped MPC With Contractive
qs  qs  qs (30) Constraint. Frequency shaping [16] has potential to improve
both energy harvesting and ride comfort simultaneously. This is
ic  ic;k  ic (31) due to the ability of frequency-shaped LQR to penalize the sprung
mass acceleration more across the bandwidth of human sensitiv-
These constraints are implemented for the following reasons: ity. This is easily done using a filter that approximates ISO 2631-
The suspension deflection is the only state that must be regu- 1evaluation of human exposure to whole-body vibration. Zuo
lated to prevent banging against the suspension end-stops. In and Nayfeh showed that this could be accomplished with the fol-
this case, qs represents the maximum value in tension and qs is lowing second-order frequency domain filter [17]:
the maximum deflection in compression. This is due to the defi-
nition of the springs being positive in compression in Sec. 2. 86:51s 546:1
The minimum and maximum input constraints are designed to Wc (35)
s2 82:17s 1892
keep the optimization bounded when energy is included in the
cost function. When this filter is applied to the sprung mass acceleration, it
Obviously, under standard LQR formulation requirements, results in a higher penalization from 1 rad/s to 55 rad/s, which is
implementing J1 in MPC results in guaranteed stability if MPC the range that humans feel vibrations.
matches LQR performance [13,14]. An issue that arises is that To implement this frequency weighting, the following state-
implementing J2 and J3 in MPC does not guarantee system space is derived from Eq. (35):
stability. This is addressed by implementing a contractive constraint
on the Lyapunov function of the system. This is of the form x_ f Af xf Bf as (36)

kxk1 k2P  kxk k2P  0 (32) yf af Cf xf (37)

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Equations (1)(4) are augmented with Eqs. (36) and (37) resulting To examine the difference in regenerative and standard quarter-
in the following state-space system: car performances, the system was simulated using many different
combinations of k1, k2, and q. In order to reduce the number of
  simulations to cover all of the cost function weightings, k2, which
A 0
Ae (38) weights suspension deflection, was held constant with a value of
Bf Cas Af
200. This was sufficient over maximum weightings on sprung
mass acceleration and tire deflection to minimize the number of
  times the suspension contacts the end-stops on a class D road.
B Once k2 was chosen, 72 simulations were run for combinations of
Be (39)
Bf Das k1 and q contained in the intervals 0; 3000 and 0; 10000,
respectively.
 
Bw 4.2 Analysis Considerations. A special consideration was
Bw;e (40)
0 taken into account when analyzing the regenerated energy of the
electrodynamic damper. If the total energy regenerated over the
  simulation time is used, the total energy regenerated will depend
C 0 on the length of the simulation. Because of this, the energy out is
Ce (41)
0 Cf normalized by the maximum regenerated energy over all cost
function weightings and road classes
 
D
De (42) Eout
0 Eout ; j 2 f A; B; C; Dg (45)
maxfEout;j g
 
x
xe
xf
(43) This results in every Eout being between 0 and 1, which shows the
regenerative trends of the electrodynamic damper when different
cost functions were used for control. The maximum regeneration
where the subscript e denotes the augmented or extended system. capability for each road class can be seen at the maximum of each
This system is discretized using the same procedure outlined in curve on the resulting plot.
Sec. 2 and implemented in the MPC of Eqs. (34a)(34f). The plots that are used to analyze the performance tradeoffs of
the electrodynamic damper are three dimension plots of Ra2s ; Rq2t ,
4 Results and Eout . This allows a comparison of the ride comfort, road hold-
ing, and energy regeneration of each cost function.
To study the capabilities of the electrodynamic damper, three
quantities of interest are compared: amount of energy regenerated
and the ratio of the square of the L2 -norms of sprung mass and 4.3 Standard MPC With Contractive Constraint. For
tire deflection, denoted Ra2s and Rq2t , respectively. The ratios are standard MPC with a contractive constraint, it was seen that for
calculated as follows: all of the cost function weightings and road classes, the electrody-
namic damper was able to regenerate energy while operating as
tf an active suspension. This can be seen in Fig. 5. In this plot, the
x2 tdt maximum energy regeneration occurs between maximum ride
comfort and maximum road holding, but higher emphasis on road
Rx2 0tf (44) holding resulted in more regenerated energy. Figure 5 also
v2i tdt showed that energy regeneration capabilities decreased quickly as
0
ride comfort was emphasized. These trends remained constant
across all of the road classes. A surprising result of this study was
where tf is the final simulation time. that all of the controllers resulted in performance that fell on the
For these gains, lower values of Ra2s and Rq2t represent better
ride comfort and road holding. These quantities are compared for
ISO road classes AD. The regenerated energy was normalized
using the maximum regenerated value across the road classes.
This was done because the energy regenerated or provided is de-
pendent on the amount of simulation time. In the following
results, a negative energy implies that energy was provided to the
system, while a positive energy indicates that energy is available
for regeneration. This is further explained in Sec. 4.2.

4.1 Simulation Setup. The simulation was run in MATLAB


with the optimization algorithms implemented using the MPT
toolbox [18]. The MPC was run with a sampling frequency of
Ts 100 Hz within the simulation space. It was important for
the L2 gains to approach ergodic behavior. Therefore, multiple
lengths of simulation were used to find the simulation length
where this occurred within a reasonable deviation. A simulation
length of 10 s was decided upon because the L2 gains reached
values that varied only slightly with longer simulation times. All
of the random roads were created using the algorithm by Agosti-
nacchio et al. [19], which emulates ISO 8608 roads of all
classes. Fig. 5 Electrodynamic damper regenerative capabilities

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Fig. 6 Ride comfort and road holding projection Fig. 8 Frequency-weighted ride comfort and road holding
projection

Table 2 Average regeneration energy

Road class A B C D

E1 (J) 96.5 349.1 1368.1 5338.0


E2 (J) 105.0 382.9 1411.8 5980.0
E2 : E1 1.09 1.10 1.03 1.12

4.4 Frequency-Weighted MPC With Contractive


Constraint. When the system was controlled using the
frequency-weighted controller outlined in Sec. 3.2, interesting
results occurred. When the weighting emphasized sprung mass
acceleration (ride comfort), the controller required energy and the
R2 , and there was simultaneous degradation of road holding and
ride comfort. This trend followed for each road class. Because it
is an objective of electrodynamic damper control to scavenge
energy while also being able to run as an active suspension, these
Fig. 7 Frequency-weighted active suspension regenerative data points were discarded for further analysis. This result also
capabilities implies that the majority of energy for regeneration by an electro-
dynamic damper occurs over the bandwidth that humans are sensi-
tive to vibration.
traditional optimal tradeoff curve for ride comfort and road hold- When the poor performance data were discarded and the data
ing [20]. It was expected that including energy as another per- were plotted and curve fit, Figs. 7 and 8 resulted. Figure 7 shows
formance consideration would result in a surface plot as opposed that, as with the standard MPC, higher emphasis on road holding
to a three-dimensional trajectory for the axes used. This should causes the electrodynamic damper to harvest more energy than
come as good news to active suspension designers because it emphasizing ride comfort. Again, all of the date points occur on
shows that optimal energy regeneration occurs on the optimal the performance tradeoff curve for ride and road holding. A differ-
tradeoff curve, so the additional considerations do not necessarily ence between the frequency-weighted results and the standard
need to be taken into account when using electrodynamic dampers design results was that energy regeneration continued to grow as
for control. Further, the previous studies have indicated that the the ride comfort degraded. A better comparison of the standard
amount of energy harvested will only increase when pitch and roll MPC to frequency-weighted MPC becomes apparent when the
are included in the vehicle [7]. This is somewhat subject to the projection on to the Ra2s  Rq2t plane is examined. When compar-
controller being used, which will be addressed in Sec. 4.4, when ing the ranges of Ra2s and Rq2t of the frequency-weighted MPC to
frequency weighting is used on the controllers. Figure 6 shows the the standard MPC, it can be seen that there is significant increase
projection of Fig. 5 onto the Ra2s  Rq2t plane, which results in in both ride comfort and road holding across all controller weight-
the familiar ride comfortroad holding Pareto front with all of ings. Further, an interesting characteristic of the frequency-
the energy regeneration data points occurring on these curves. To weighted controller is that there is a minimum on the tradeoff
benchmark the MPC controller, skyhook was implemented and curve where Rq2t reaches a minimum, indicating a maximum road
simulated using the generated road profiles. The simulated sky- holding potential. As the curve moves to the right with decreasing
hook performance fell within small deviations from the perform- ride comfort, road holding decreases as well but energy regenera-
ance curves shown in Sec. 4.3. Further, the skyhook controller tion continues to increase. This signifies that the controller is
performance was near maximum energy harvesting as shown in allowing higher relative velocities across the damper which har-
Fig. 5. Because of this observation, the skyhook results have not vests more energy. Along with the increase in standard suspension
been included on the performance curves. performance, the frequency-weighted controller also increases the

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amount of energy that the suspension is capable of sequestering. There are multiple potential routes for this such as using explicit
Table 2 shows the average value of regenerated energy for both MPC to derive the resulting controller.
controllers over all of the road classes. In the table, E1 denotes
the maximum energy out for the standard MPC controller and Nomenclature
E2 denotes the maximum energy out for the frequency-
weighted MPC controller. The last row of the table is the ratio S the set of all positive semidefinite matrices
of regenerated energy for the maximum frequency-weighted x the vector x
controller to the maximum regenerated energy of the standard xk the variable x at sample period k in discrete space
controller. Row 3 of Table 2 is the ratio of maximum energy x the upper bound of variable x
regenerated for the frequency filtered MPC to the maximum x the lower bound of variable x
energy regenerated by the standard MPC. This table shows that kxk2P the quadratic form, xTPx, parametrized by P 2 S
there is a 312% increase in maximum energy regeneration
capabilities when the frequency-weighted controller is used. References
This also indicates that there is a small amount of energy avail- [1] Clemen, L., and Margolis, D., 2014, Modeling and Control of a Quarter Car
able outside of the bandwidth of human sensitivity that can be Electrodynamic Air-Suspension, International Conference on Bond Graph
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V
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