Design of robust controller for a half-vehicle active suspension system with input delay

This article is concerned with the problem of robust H∞ control for a half-vehicle active suspension system with input delay. The delay is assumed to be interval time-varying delay with unknown derivative. The vehicle front sprung mass and the rear unsprung mass are assumed to be varying due to vehicle load variation and may result in parameter uncertainties being modelled by polytopic uncertainty. First of all, regarding the heave and pitch accelerations as the optimisation objectives, and suspension deflection and relative tire load constraints as the output constraints, we build the corresponding suspension systems. Then, by constructing a novel Lyapunov functional involved with the lower and upper bounds of the delay, sufficient condition for the existence of robust H∞ controller is given to ensure robust asymptotical stability of the closed-loop system and also guarantee the constrained performance. The condition can be converted into convex optimisation problem and verified easily by means of standard software. Finally, a design example is exploited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.