Nonstationary Response of Vehicles on Rough Ground—A State Space Approach

The motion of vehicles traveling over rough ground at variable speed is non-stationary. In this paper, a method for the computation of response variance is presented which uses the concept of a “spatial” shaping filter to represent the uneven ground, leading to a state space form for the combination of vehicle and excitation. The formulation is for linear systems of arbitrary order and allows any deterministic velocity history to be accommodated easily. An example is discussed in detail.