Abstract
Proper tuning of a racing vehicle’s suspension is essential to maximizing performance. Professional teams often use third-party services which can be expensive and are only suited for specific terrain. The methods used by these service providers are often considered industry secrets and are curtained-off to the public. This article proposes a system for quantifying the performance of a vehicle’s suspension using methods that can be easily recreated and reused. The system monitors the linear displacement of the suspension at each wheel and the acceleration and rotational orientation of the vehicle’s body as it is driven over terrain with a known topology at a recorded speed. The position of the vehicle’s center of mass relative to the terrain is simulated using MATLAB for the ideal suspension behavior at the given speed. By comparing the recorded data with the idealized behavior, the actual behavior of the suspension is then calculated and displayed using Simscape Multibody. They showed promising results for the acquisition of the suspension and orientation data. However, resolving the position of the vehicle using acceleration data proved to be overly susceptible to small errors requiring a new approach for future studies.