Geometric disturbance decoupling control of vehicles with active suspensions

In this paper the problem of localizing disturbances of a vehicle with active suspensions is investigated. We focus on the regulation of the chassis posture in spite of inaccessible disturbances. The regulated variables, i.e. the roll and pitch angles and the chassis heights, can be disturbance decoupled by state feedback. The decoupling problem is analyzed from a geometric control point of view. The geometric aspects of the vehicle dynamics are emphasized and it is shown that disturbance localization is a structural property of vehicles with active suspensions. On the implementation side, we show that, if suspensions heights along with their derivatives are available as measured outputs, disturbance localization can be gained by a static output feedback.