In order to present a useful method for designing active suspension of
a vehicle, a linear full-car model is used in this investigation. In
this model, the dampers of passive system are totally replaced by actu
ators. The actuators are controlled with optimal full state vector fee
dback. After determining feedback coefficients, the responses of activ
e and passive systems were compared and it was found that performance
of active system is much superior. It is desired that, changes in vehi
cle parameters would not affect the system's performance and hence sho
uld not violate its optimality. In other words, the system should beha
ve adaptively using Model Reference Adaptive Control. The optimally co
ntrolled active suspension was used as a model for the active suspensi
on of vehicle, In this way, the suspension of vehicle is controlled in
such a way that its output approaches to that of the optimal active m
odel. Thus the suspension should behave just like the optimal one.