Adaptive Sensor Fault Accommodation for Vehicle Active Suspensions via Partial Measurement Information

In this article, an adaptive sensor fault accommodation scheme is proposed for uncertain vehicle active suspensions via output-feedback control where vehicle body displacement is the only measurable output signal corrupted by sensor bias. An adaptive observer with variable gains is constructed to obtain state estimates whose design procedure involves parameter adaption of the uncertain system parameters and sensor bias, and an output-feedback controller is designed to attenuate the vehicle body displacement based on the partial measurement information, estimates of the states, and unknown parameters. Compensation for measurement error is made both in the design process of the adaptive observer and output-feedback controller in order to weaken the influence brought about by sensor bias fault. In order to guarantee system stability, the variable observer gains are determined in real time using a switching strategy where their values can be modified in finite times by monitoring the state estimates generated by the observer itself. It is proved that the vehicle body displacement will converge to a small neighborhood around zero, and all the signals of the closed-loop system are ensured to be bounded through selecting suitable control parameters. Simulation is carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed method and results indicate that better stabilization of the suspension vertical motion can be achieved through adaptive compensation for sensor bias.