Adaptive control of an active suspension for nonlinear time varying vehicle plant

This paper presents a new adaptive control approach to general multi-degree s-of-freedom suspension models. The control concept diverts from the widely applied optimal control to adaptive control. The basic idea involves obtai ning optimal performance of any nonlinear time varying suspension model by adaptively following a predefined reference model. Optimal performance is a chieved by an adaptive control law, which involves feed forward, feedback a nd auxiliary controller parameters. Model reference adaptive control is use d to derive adaptation laws for the controller. The proposed control scheme is computationally fast and does not require a priori knowledge of complex nonlinear dynamic variations and time varying parameters of the model. Sim ulation results for a two-degree of freedom nonlinear suspension model subj ected to random asphalt road input are presented. The time and frequency do main results indicate good performance of adaptive controller even for larg e dynamic variations of model.