Abstract
When large external forces come from the road, a suspension stroke reaches its limitation and riding comfort may decrease. To overcome this problem, we propose a new control method for an active suspension that can avoid reaching the stroke limitation. A sliding mode controller is designed by considering the rigidity variation of a spring. Also, in order to estimate the internal state of the suspension, a variable structural system (VSS) observer is designed without the information of nonlinear force occurring in the rigidity variation when the suspension reaches the stroke limitation. By carrying out simulation and experiment of a quarter-car model, it is verified that the performance of the controller is superior to that of the method, which switches to a passive damper near the stroke limitation from a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) in a small stroke range.
