Active Disturbance Rejection Control for an automotive suspension system based on parameter tuning using a fuzzy technique

Road surface roughness is the cause of vehicle vibration, which is considered a system disturbance. Previous studies on suspension system control often ignore the influence of disturbances while designing the controller, leading to system performance degradation under severe vibration conditions. In this work, we propose a control method to improve active suspension performance that reduces vehicle vibration by eliminating the influence of road disturbances. The proposed method is formed based on the combination of an Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) technique with control coefficients tuned by a dynamic fuzzy technique formed based on special membership functions called Active Disturbance Rejection Control Based on Fuzzy (ADRCBF). An Extended State Observer (ESO) estimates state variables and disturbances. The performance of the proposed controller is evaluated through the numerical simulation process with three different cases. According to the calculation results, the acceleration and displacement of the sprung mass are significantly reduced when the suspension system is controlled by the proposed technique, compared with the passive suspension system and the active suspension system controlled by a Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) technique. In addition, the suspension travel follows the road disturbance with a small error. The error estimated by the ESO does not exceed 3.5% (for sinusoidal and random excitation). In general, system adaptation is ensured under many investigated conditions based on tuning the controller parameters by the soft computing method.