In this digital age, car engineers are continuing to find innovative ways to improve the thing that underpins all road vehicles, the chassis.
To that end, ZF has been showing off its Chassis 2.0 strategy, which combines smart hardware, artificial intelligence and software to improve functionality, and at CES last month it introduced two new features. One was Active Noise Reduction and the other AI Road Sense.
AI Road Sense is designed to assess the road surface ahead of the car and make rapid adjustments to the suspension settings, subtly configuring the chassis set-up to better cope with its immediate future.
There has been a fair bit of industry research into using on-board systems to ‘read’ the road surface and detect either changing conditions due to rain, snow or ice or the quality of the road surface itself.
Honda Research Institute USA, for example, ran a pilot scheme for a road condition monitoring system. The idea was to use GPS location details and data from sensors such as cameras to gather road condition information and share it anonymously with road authorities looking after road maintenance.
Nexteer Automotive, working with Tactile Mobility, won a CES Innovation Award in 2023 for its Road Detection Software, which collects real-time road friction data via virtual sensors and, using AI, assigns it to various road condition categories such as ‘dry’, ‘ice’ or ‘wet’.
That data is then sent to the cloud, where it can be shared with following vehicles, alerting them to the conditions ahead.
In 2016 JLR presented its research into a surface identification system as part of its wider All Terrain Autonomy Technology programme.
Using a combination of radar and ultrasonic sensors to scan the path immediately ahead, the system could advise the driver about the viability of continuing without getting stuck.
The ZF system differs from all of these in that it continuously reconfigures the chassis to “improve safety and comfort” by predicting road and surface conditions and instantly adapting the car’s behaviour.
The clever thinking is done by ZF’s Cubix chassis software, which also controls Active Noise Reduction. Data is collected by the car’s existing sensors and from that the system adjusts damping torque distribution to the wheels and chassis settings to suit the surface conditions.
The software also has a function called Driver Behaviour Recognition, which analyses the driver’s use of the controls to predict driving style and set apt comfort preferences.
ZF’s car maker customers can choose from three configurations, which can be adapted to suit different sizes of vehicle.
The Standard version relies on existing data running through the car’s on-board data network; Advanced adds camera-based surface detection; and Premium also includes lidar scanning, which can generate a 3D profile up to 25 metres ahead.
