Nonlinear Adaptive Control of Active Suspensions

In this paper, a previously developed nonlinear “sliding” control law is applied to an electro-hydraulic suspension system. The controller relies on an accurate model of the suspension system. To reduce the error in the model, a standard parameter adaptation scheme, based on Lyapunov analysis, is introduced. A modified adaptation scheme, which enables the identification of parameters whose values change with regions of the state space, is then presented. These parameters are not restricted to being slowly time-varying as in the standard adaptation scheme; however, they are restricted to being constant or slowly time varying within regions of the state space. The adaptation algorithms are coupled with the control algorithm and the resulting system performance is analyzed experimentally. The performance is determined by the ability of the actuator output to track a specified force. The performance of the active system, with and without the adaptation, is analyzed. Simulation and experimental results show that the active system is better than a passive system in terms of improving the ride quality of the vehicle. Furthermore, both of the adaptive schemes improve performance, with the modified scheme giving the greater improvement in performance.