Reduced vibration of off-road vehicle nonlinear suspension system using an adaptive integral sliding mode-neural network controller

Off-road terrains invariably impose a larger excitation amplitude and frequency to the suspension system of vehicles. Therefore, it is a more arduous task to reach an improved ride and handling compromise for these vehicles. The natural nonlinear dynamics related to the suspension system exacerbates the vibration response of the vehicle. In this paper, a novel robust and adaptive ISMC-NN controller is proposed to control the vibration response of vehicles traversing deformable terrains. For this purpose, a sliding surface with a novel reaching law is employed for the global asymptotic stability of the controller and the controller robustness against the unknown disturbances is improved. Lyapunov stability theorem is employed to ensure the stability and also tuning the adaptive parameters of the proposed controller. The effectiveness of the proposed controller for attenuation of the vibration response of vehicles traversing off-road terrains is verified compared to a conventional sliding mode controller. The high-fidelity MSC ADAMS based co-simulations were implemented to validate the practicality of the proposed controller.