ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 Smart Sensor Network for the Evaluation of Motorcycle Suspension Systems

Smart sensors and transducers are being widely employed in the development of electronically controlled systems, such as advanced suspensions, to improve the performance guaranteed by terrestrial vehicles. Nevertheless, a standard reference for the full exploitation of the smart features is not yet extensively adopted. The CAN-bus is only used for the communication functionalities within a sensor network, resulting in cost-effective and more reliable connections. An original data-driven approach, based on both the CAN-bus and the IEEE ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451 standard, is proposed for the characterization of suspension systems of two-wheel vehicles with regard to the comfort and vehicle handling. Because of the ISO/IEC/IEEE 21451, the data acquired from sensor are sent by means of a GPS-General Packet Radio Service module to PC software that implements the processing algorithm. The proposed methodology includes a low-cost measurement setup, data processing algorithms in both time and frequency domain, and the introduction of model-free synthetic indices to experimentally compare the on-road behavior influenced by different damping characteristics for the suspension system. The method is applied to the on-road verification of the riding comfort assured by different control strategies for semiactive suspensions.