Multi-objective control of vehicle active suspension systems via load-dependent controllers

This paper presents a load-dependent controller design approach to solve the problem of multi-objective control for vehicle active suspension systems by using linear matrix inequalities. A quarter-car model with active suspension system is considered. It is assumed that the vehicle body mass resides in an interval and can be measured online. This approach of designing controllers, whose gain matrix depends on the online available information of the body mass, is based on a parameter-dependent Lyapunov function. Since the parameter-dependent idea is fully exploited, the proposed controller design approach can yield much less conservative results compared with previous approaches that design robust constant controllers in the quadratic framework. The usefulness and the advantages of the proposed controller design methodology are demonstrated via numerical simulations. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.