A New Switching Adaptive Fuzzy Controller with an Application to Vibration Control of a Vehicle Seat Suspension Subjected to Disturbances

This paper proposes a new switching adaptive fuzzy controller and applies it to vibration control of a vehicle seat suspension equipped with a semi-active magnetorheological (MR) damper. The proposed control system consists of three functioned filters: (1) Filter 1: a model of interval type 2 fuzzy to compensate disturbances; (2) Filter 2: a ‘switching term’ to evaluate the magnitude of disturbance; and (3) Filter 3: a group of adaptation laws to enhance the robustness of control input. These filters play a role of powerful shields to improve control performance and guarantee the stability of the applied system subjected to external disturbances. After embedding a PID (proportional-integral-derivative) model into Riccati-like equation, main control parameters are updated based on the adaptation laws. The proposed controller is then synthesized in two different cases: high disturbance and small disturbance. For the high disturbance, a special type of sliding surface function, which relates to an exponential function and its t-norm, is used to increase the energy of control system. For the small disturbance, the energy from the modified t-norm of the sliding surface is neglected to reduce the energy consumption with maintaining the desired performance. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller, a vehicle seat suspension installed with controllable MR damper is adopted to reflect the robustness against external disturbances corresponding to road excitations. It is validated from computer simulation that the proposed controller can provide better vibration control performance than other existing robust controllers showing excellent control stability with well-reduced displacement and velocity at the position of the seat.