The Handling-Comfort Trade-Off in a Quarter-Car System: Automatic Adaptive Management via Active Disturbance Rejection Control

Abstract. The effectiveness of a vehicle suspension is often assessed by maximum passenger comfort given continuous contact with the road (road holding). This paper investigates managing the comfort-handling trade-off in a quarter-car suspension system via active disturbance rejection control (ADRC). An adaptive control law is built to manage this trade-off automatically depending on the ADRC parameters. The idea is to use the ADRC-estimated disturbance signal to adjust the system’s domain of interest. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated: the adaptive control law is tested for a nonlinear hydraulic suspension system. Moreover, the effects of road disturbances amplitudes and road quality on the system performance are studied. Simulation results show the smoothness and simplicity of the adaptive algorithm for managing the comfort-handling trade-off.

Keywords: active disturbance rejection control (ADRC), quarter-car model (QCM), tracking differentiator (TD), nonlinear state error feedback (NLSEF), extended state observer (ESO), disturbance rejection scheme (DRS), proportional-integral-differential (PID) controller, proportional-differential (PD) controller, road handling, ride comfort, road holding, gradient MIT rule (adaptive control method).