Robust control of vehicle electrorheological suspension subject to measurement noises

Abstract

In this paper, a novel robust control approach is presented for a semi-active suspension with electrorheological (ER) dampers considering suspension parameter uncertainties, control input constraint, and measurement noises. By representing the suspension with parameter uncertainties in a polytopic form, applying a norm-bounded approach to handle control input constraint, and constructing an appropriate observer to estimate state variables from noisy measurements, the design of this controller is realised by solving a finite number of linear matrix inequalities with optimised performance on ride comfort and estimation error. Numerical simulations on a quarter-car suspension with an ER damper are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The obtained results show that the designed controller can achieve good suspension performance despite the presence of measurement noises and the variations on sprung mass and ER damper time constant with constrained control input.

Keywords:

• vehicle suspension
• robust control
• noisy measurements
• parameter uncertainities
• control input constraint
• electrorheological damper

Acknowledgements

The financial support of this work by Early Career Research Grant, University of Technology, Sydney, and the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP0773415) is gratefully acknowledged.