A new coordinated control strategy for tracked vehicle ride comfort

To improve tracked vehicle ride comfort and minimize weapon’s vibration, a coordinated control strategy is developed for tracked vehicles’ semi-active suspension systems. A model with eight degrees-of-freedom for a tracked vehicle equipped with magnetorheological dampers is established, and is followed by the formulation of a sliding mode controller. The proposed control algorithm is a localized-based controller that can change its target location in the tracked vehicle to where it is needed most. A co-simulation system model including a six-wheel tracked vehicle multi-body dynamics model, coordinated control strategy, and magnetorheological damper force allocator is developed to analyze the ride performance under bump and random road excitations. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed strategy is very effective in improving the vehicle’s ride performance and is much better than the traditional skyhook controllers. The innovation of this paper can be concluded as the coordinated control strategy can simultaneously improve vertical acceleration and pitch acceleration for the hull, which is of great importance for combat situations.