Robust Control Design for Vehicle Active Suspension Systems with Uncertainty

A vehicle active suspension system, in comparison with its counterparts, plays a crucial role in adequately guarantee the stability of the vehicle and improve the suspension performances. With a full understanding of the state of the art in vehicle control systems, this thesis identifies key issues in robust control design for active suspension systems with uncertainty, contributes to enhance the suspension performances via handling tradeoffs between ride comfort, road holding and suspension deflection. Priority of this thesis is to emphasize the contributions in handing actuator-related challenges and suspension model parameter uncertainty. The challenges in suspension actuators are identified as time-varying actuator delay and actuator faults. Time-varying delay and its effects in suspension actuators are targeted and analyzed. By removing the assumptions from the state of the art methods, state-feedback and output-feedback controller design methods are proposed to design less conservative state-feedback and output-feedback controller existence conditions. It overcomes the challenges brought by generalized timevarying actuator delay. On the other hand, a novel fault-tolerant controller design algorithm is developed for active suspension systems with uncertainty of actuator faults. A continuous-time homogeneous Markov process is presented for modeling the actuator failure process. The fault-tolerant H∞ controller is designed to guarantee asymptotic the stability, H∞ performance, and the constrained performance with existing possible actuator failures. It is evident that vehicle model parameter uncertainty is a vital factor affecting the performances of suspension control system. Consequently, this thesis presents two robust control solutions to overcome suspension control challenges with nonlinear constraints. A novel fuzzy control design algorithm is presented for active suspension systems with uncertainty. By using the sector nonlinearity method, Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems are used to model the system. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, a new reliable fuzzy controller is designed to improve suspension performances. A novel adaptive sliding mode controller design approach is also developed for nonlinear uncertain vehicle active suspension systems. An adaptive sliding mode controller is designed to guarantee the stability and improve the suspension performances. In conclusion, novel control design algorithms are proposed for active suspension systems with uncertainty in order to guarantee and improve the suspension performance. Simulation results and comparison with the state of the art methods are provided to evaluate the effectiveness of the research contributions. The thesis shows insights into practical solutions to vehicle active suspension systems, it is expected that these algorithms will have significant potential in industrial applications and electric vehicles industry.