Drive Signal Simulation through Vehicle Suspension Modeling

Road simulation testing of vehicles is often performed using a four posters road
simulator. Four hydraulic actuators are used to replicate motions recorded during a
previous test-drive using a drive signal. Typically, recordings are made of the vehicle
sprung and unsprung accelerations at each of the four corners of the vehicle during an
actual field-test. The hydraulic actuators are then driven and iterative tuning is performed
such that the vehicle sprung and unsprung accelerations track those measured in the field.
Thus realistic suspension movements can be reproduced with the drive signal obtained
from the iterative approach.