A Bioinspired Dynamics-Based Adaptive Tracking Control for Nonlinear Suspension Systems

This paper investigates the energy-efficiency design of adaptive control for active suspension systems with a bioinspired nonlinearity approach. To this aim, a bioinspired dynamics-based adaptive tracking control is proposed for nonlinear suspension systems. In many existing techniques, one important effort is used for canceling vibration energy transmitted by suspension inherent nonlinearity to improve ride comfort. Unlike existing methods, the proposed approach takes full advantage of beneficial nonlinear stiffness and damping characteristics inspired by the limb motion dynamics of biological systems to achieve advantageous nonlinear suspension properties with potentially less energy consumption. The stability analysis of the desired bioinspired nonlinear dynamics is conducted within the Lyapunov framework. Theoretical analysis and simulation results reveal that the proposed bioinspired nonlinear dynamics-based adaptive controller has a significant impact on the amount of energy consumption, considering the same basic control method and random excitation of road irregularity for a similar ride comfort performance.