A Design Synthesis Method for Robust Controllers of Active Vehicle Suspensions

Abstract

This paper presents a design synthesis method for robust controllers of active vehicle suspensions (AVSs). Various control techniques have been applied to the design of AVSs for enhancing ride comfort and handling performance of ground vehicles. However, most of these model-based controller designs show poor robustness when the vehicle models are not accurate and operating conditions vary. To address the poor robustness problem of AVSs, a new controller is designed using the H∞ loop-shaping control technique. The controller targets robustness issues on vehicle models with parametric uncertainties and unmodelled dynamics. To facilitate the robust controller design, a design synthesis method is proposed: the H∞ loop-shaping controller design is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, the weighting functions’ parameters of the controller are treated as design variables, the expensive computing loads are handled by a parallel computing technique, and the solution of the optimization problem is the desired robust AVS controller. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed AVS design.

Keywords

• design synthesis method
• active vehicle suspensions
• robust controllers
• <i>H</i>_∞ loop-shaping controller
• design optimization
• parallel computing