Online Classification of Road Roughness Conditions with Vehicle Unsprung Mass Acceleration by Sliding Time Window

Suspension control systems are in need for more information of road roughness conditions to improve their performance under different roads. Existing methods of gauging road roughness are limited, and they usually involve visual inspections or special vehicles equipped with instruments that can gauge physical measurements of road irregularities. This paper proposes data collection for a period of a time from accelerometers fixed on unsprung mass and uses the mean square values of this datasets divided by vehicle speed to classify the roughness conditions of a section of a road. This approach is possible due to the existence of relationships between the power spectral densities of the road surface, unsprung mass accelerations via a transfer function, and vehicle speed. This paper gave the relationship between the resolution of road roughness classification and the length of time-window and suggestions about choosing the appropriate time-window length on the balance of road roughness resolution and classification delay. Moreover, to enhance the stability of classification, the influence of damping parameters of vehicle suspension on the classification output is studied, and a classification method of road roughness is proposed based on neural network and damping coefficient correction.