Active motion compensation control test bench for off-highway vehicle

To meet the requirements of increasing off-highway vehicle productivity and of higher safety requirements, an improvement on boom/bucket stability of off-high way vehicles has been commanded in industry on multiple platforms. Various control algorithms have been developed to deal with the motion compensation problem. Developing and implementing the controllers directly on a vehicle is challenging because of its complexity, potential safety concerns, and high cost. In this paper, a testbench was developed to validate the effectiveness of control algorithms and to conduct initial parameter tunings of the controller, so that the technical risks can be reduced before vehicle level's controller tuning. Taking a concrete boom truck as the representative platform, typical boom cylinders are selected as target cylinders for motion compensation. The disturbance force applied on boom in a real operating environment was emulated, and one controller was developed to evaluate feasibility of boom motion control under disturbance load. A special approach to generate a representative test vectors was also presented in this paper, which can effectively cover a family of arbitrary duty cycle data given the amplitude and the bandwidth ranges. This approach can effectively generate a set of test vectors for an off-highway vehicle to emulate its operating environment. Good motion control results were recorded on the test bench, which proved the effectiveness of the control algorithm, and further enabled the implementation of the controller on a real concrete boom truck vehicle.