Robust Adaptive Controls of a Vehicle Seat Suspension System

This work proposes two novel adaptive fuzzy controllers and applies them to vibration control of a vehicle seat suspension system subjected to severe road profiles. The first adaptive controller is designed by considering prescribed performance of the sliding surface and combined with adaptation laws so that robust stability is guaranteed in the presence of external disturbances. As for the second adaptive controller, both the H-infinity controller and sliding mode controller are combined using inversely fuzzified values of the fuzzy model. In order to evaluate control performances of the proposed two adaptive controllers, a semi-active vehicle suspension system installed with a magneto-rheological (MR) damper is adopted. After determining control gains, two controllers are applied to the system and vibration control performances such as displacement at the driver’s position are evaluated and presented in time domain. In this work, to demonstrate the control robustness two severe road profiles of regular bump and random step wave are imposed as external disturbances. It is shown that both adaptive controllers can enhance ride comfort of the driver by reducing the displacement and acceleration at the seat position. This excellent performance is achieved from each benefit of each adaptive controller; accurate tracking performance of the first controller and fast convergence time of the second controller