Patent ID: 8322728

Claim:
A suspension control apparatus comprising: a damping force adjustable shock absorber interposed between a vehicle body and a wheel of a vehicle; and a control apparatus operable to control the damping characteristic of the shock absorber, the damping characteristic of the shock absorber being changed by an instruction from the control apparatus, wherein the control apparatus comprises a first up/down motion calculating unit operable to calculate an up/down motion of a first point set to any position of the vehicle body, a roll motion estimating unit operable to estimate a roll motion of the vehicle body, a pitch motion estimating unit operable to estimate a pitch motion of the vehicle body, a various portions up/down motion calculating unit operable to calculate up/down motions of various portions of the vehicle body based on the up/down motion, the roll motion and the pitch motion, and a controller operable to calculate the instruction according to the up/down motions of the various portions and output the instruction to the damping force adjustable shock absorber; and the pitch motion estimating unit comprises a wheel-speed time-rate-of-change calculating unit operable to detect a rotation of the wheel and calculate a wheel-speed time-rate based on the detected rotation of the wheel, a forward/backward acceleration obtaining unit provided separately from the wheel-speed time-rate-of-change calculating unit and being operable to detect or estimate a forward/backward acceleration of the vehicle, and a subtracting unit operable to calculate a pitch rate based on a difference between the wheel-speed time-rate-of-change and the forward/backward acceleration.