Adaptive sliding mode-based active disturbance rejection control for vehicle suspension control

This article presents an adaptive sliding mode-based active disturbance rejection control strategy for the quarter car active suspension control. The suspension system is problematic for its nonlinearities from the dampers, springs, and irregular excitation from the road surface. This study considers this complex behavior and nonlinear characteristics of the suspension system and uses an adaptive sliding mode control law and an extended state observer to estimate and eliminate them from the controlled system. The central concept is to combine the advantages of adaptive sliding mode control to accurately track the reference trajectory with the ability of active disturbance rejection control to reject the parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The proposed control scheme is verified in simulation studies with parameter uncertainties, nonlinearities, and external disturbances. The simulation results show that the proposed control scheme can significantly improve vehicles’ ride comfort and road-handling ability, owing to the extended state observer’s estimation capability. A comparison of the proposed strategy is also presented with a linear active disturbance rejection control and a conventional proportional–integral–derivative controller. Simulation results show that adaptive sliding mode-based active disturbance rejection improves the robustness against modeling errors, nonlinearities, and disturbances.