Hybrid control of an active suspension system with full-car model using H∞ and nonlinear adaptive control methods

This paper presents hybrid control of an active suspension system with a full-car model by using H_∞ and nonlinear adaptive control methods. The full-car model has seven degrees of freedom including heaving, pitching and rolling motions. In the active suspension system, the controller shows good performance: small gains from the road disturbances to the heaving, pitching and rolling accelerations of the car body. Also the controlled system must be robust to system parameter variations. As the control method, H_∞ controller is designed so as to guarantee the robustness of a closed-loop system in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances. The system parameter variations are taken into account by multiplicative uncertainty model and the system robustness is guaranteed by small gain theorem. The active system with H_∞ controller can reduce the accelerations of the car body in the heaving, pitching and rolling directons. The nonlinearity of a hydraulic actuator is handled by nonlinear adaptive control based on the back-stepping method. The effectiveness of the controllers is verified through simulation results in both frequency and time domains.