Smart sensing and smart material for smart automotive damping

Vehicle suspensions represent one of the most interesting applications of dampening, where the introduction of smart damping technologies and control policies lead hardware and software designers to overcome new measurement challenges. Advanced sensing techniques have been proposed and tested for real-time execution by an automotive ECU based on a DSP-microcontroller. Smart sensing is able both to improve noise filtering of the signals provided by low-cost sensors and detect specific motorcycle dynamics which most influence the road holding and comfort. Finally, an ANN has been modeled, which can be effectively adopted as a benchmark (in terms of false alarms and correctly detected faults) in the development of fault detection strategies (i.e., threshold identification) directed to the sensor validation of the rear suspension stroke.