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Robust active suspension design subject to vehicle inertial parameter variations

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Abstract

This paper presents an approach in designing a robust controller for vehicle suspensions considering changes in vehicle inertial properties. A four-degree-of-freedom half-car model with active suspension is studied in this paper, and three main performance requirements are considered. Among these requirements, the ride comfort performance is optimized by minimizing the H norm of the transfer function from the road disturbance to the sprung mass acceleration, while the road holding performance and the suspension deflection limitation are guaranteed by constraining the generalized H 2 (GH 2) norms of the transfer functions from the road disturbance to the dynamic tyre load and the suspension deflection to be less than their hard limits, respectively. At the same time, the controller saturation problem is considered by constraining its peak response output to be less than a given limit using the GH 2 norm as well. By solving the finite number of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) with the minimization optimization procedure, the controller gains, which are dependent on the time-varying inertial parameters, can be obtained. Numerical simulations on both frequency and bump responses show that the designed parameter-dependent controller can achieve better active suspension performance compared with the passive suspension in spite of the variations of inertial parameters.

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Correspondence to Hai-Ping Du.

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This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (No.ARC LP0560077) and the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Hai-Ping Du received the Ph.D. degree in mechanical design and theory from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, PRC in 2002. He was awarded the excellent Ph.D. Thesis Prize by Shanghai Provincial Government in 2004. He is currently a lecturer in the School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering, Faculty of Informatics, University of Wollongong, Australia. Previously, he worked as a research fellow in the Faculty of Engineering, University of Technology, Sydney from 2006 to 2008, as a post-doctoral research associate in the University of Hong Kong and Imperial College London from 2002 to 2003 and 2004 to 2005, respectively.

His research interests include robust control theory and engineering applications, soft computing, dynamic system modelling, model and controller reduction, and smart materials and structures.

Nong Zhang received the Ph.D. degree in 1989 from the University of Tokyo, Japan. In the same year, as a research assistant professor, he joined the Faculty of Engineering of the University. In 1992, as a research fellow, he joined the Engineering Faculty of the University of Melbourne, Australia. In 1995, he joined the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He is a member of ASME and a fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers, Australasia.

His research interests include experimental modal analysis, rotor dynamics, vehicle powertrain dynamics, and recently hydraulically interconnected suspension and vehicle dynamics.

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Du, HP., Zhang, N. Robust active suspension design subject to vehicle inertial parameter variations. Int. J. Autom. Comput. 7, 419–427 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-010-0523-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11633-010-0523-7

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