Backstepping Control for Semi-Active Suspension of Half-Vehicle with Dahl Magnetorheological Damper Model

The paper presents a study on the control of the half-vehicle semi-active suspension system with the magnetorheological dampers (MR). As MR damper dynamics is highly nonlinear, the backstepping control system design for a half-vehicle semi-active suspension equipped by an MR dampers is considered. The control objective is to regulate well the heave and the pitch motion of the chassis despite the road irregularities and the inaccessibility to measurements of the hysteresis internal state variables of MR dampers. In this paper, first the half-vehicle model is presented and the MR dampers dynamics are represented by the Dahl model. Next, a backstepping controller that considers the semi-active suspension performance requirements is designed. Numerical simulations are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.