A Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Model-based Control Strategy for Variable Stiffness and Variable Damping Suspension

As the concept of variable stiffness and variable damping (VSVD) has increasingly drawn attention, suspensions applied with magnetorheological (MR) dampers to achieve varying stiffness and damping have been an attractive method to improve vehicle performance and driver comfort further. As highly nonlinearity of MR damper dynamics and coupled interconnections in the case of multi-output control, to build a direct control system for VSVD suspension based on multiple MR dampers is difficult. Applying Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model on the VSVD system enables the linear control theory to be directly utilized to build the multi-output controller for multi-MR dampers. In this paper, a T-S fuzzy model is established to describe an MR VSVD suspension model, and then an controller that considers the multi-input/multi-output (MIMO) coupled interconnections characteristic and multi-object optimization is designed. To estimate state information for the T-S fuzzy model in real-time, a state observer is designed and integrated in the controller. Then, the performance of the VSVD control algorithm was evaluated by numerical simulation. The results demonstrate that the T-S fuzzy model-based controller outperforms the independent control method for a VSVD suspension system with multi-MR dampers.