Investigation of semi-active hydro-pneumatic suspension control using neural network based sliding mode method

This paper presents a controller development for improving vehicle ride comfort ability utilizing neural based sliding mode control method. A non-linear model of a quarter car equipped with hydro-pneumatic suspension and controllable damper was developed. An advanced sky-hook model was adopted as the reference model. A non-linear sliding mode controller was developed to drive the states of the controlled system to follow those of the reference model through the damping force control. Then a neural network was integrated to decrease the chatting problem of sliding mode control. The performance of the proposed controller was verified in Matlab/Simulink. The simulation results show that neural based sliding mode control can improve vehicle ride comfort ability significantly and enjoys a strong robustness against vehicle parameter change.