Review:Advances in the control of mechatronic suspension systems

The suspension system is a key element in motor vehicles. Advancements in electronics and microprocessor technology have led to the realization of mechatronic suspensions. Since its introduction in some production motorcars in the 1980 s, it has remained an area which sees active research and development, and this will likely continue for many years to come. With the aim of identifying current trends and future focus areas, this paper presents a review on the state-of-the-art of mechatronic suspensions. First, some commonly used classifications of mechatronic suspensions are presented. This is followed by a discussion on some of the actuating mechanisms used to provide control action. A survey is then reported on the many types of control approaches, including look-ahead preview, predictive, fuzzy logic, proportional–integral–derivative(PID), optimal, robust, adaptive, robust adaptive,and switching control. In conclusion, hydraulic actuators are most commonly used, but they impose high power requirements, limiting practical realizations of active suspensions. Electromagnetic actuators are seen to hold the promise of lower power requirements, and rigorous research and development should be conducted to make them commercially usable. Current focus on control methods that are robust to suspension parameter variations also seems to produce limited performance improvements, and future control approaches should be adaptive to the changeable driving conditions.

A New Hybrid Control Scheme for an Integrated Helicopter and Engine System

A new hybrid control scheme is presented with a robust multiple model fusion control（RMMFC） law for a UH-60 helicopter and an active disturbance rejection control（ADRC） controller for its engines.This scheme is a control design method with every subsystem designed separately but fully considering the couplings between them.With three subspaces with respect to forward flight velocity,a RMMFC is proposed to devise a four-loop reference signal tracing control for the helicopter,which escapes the closed-loop system from unstable state due to the extreme complexity of this integrated nonlinear system.The engines are controlled by the proposed ADRC decoupling controller,which fully takes advantage of a good compensation ability for unmodeled dynamics and extra disturbances,so as to compensate torque disturbance in power turbine speed loop.By simulating a forward acceleration flight task,the RMMFC for the helicopter is validated.It is apparent that the integrated helicopter and engine system（IHES） has much better dynamic performance under the new control scheme.Especially in the switching process,the large transient is significantly weakened,and smooth transition among candidate controllers is achieved.Over the entire simulation task,the droop of power turbine speed with the proposed ADRC controller is significantly slighter than with the conventional PID controller,and the response time of the former is much faster than the latter.By simulating a rapid climb and descent flight task,the results also show the feasibility for the application of the proposed multiple model fusion control.Although there is aggressive power demand in this maneuver,the droop of power turbine speed with an ADRC controller is smaller than using a PID controller.The control performance for helicopter and engine is enhanced by adopting this hybrid control scheme,and simulation results in other envelope state give proofs of robustness for this new scheme.

Fuzzy adaptive tracking control within the full envelope for an unmanned aerial vehicle

Motivated by the autopilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle（UAV） with a wide flight envelope span experiencing large parametric variations in the presence of uncertainties, a fuzzy adaptive tracking controller（FATC） is proposed. The controller consists of a fuzzy baseline controller and an adaptive increment, and the main highlight is that the fuzzy baseline controller and adaptation laws are both based on the fuzzy multiple Lyapunov function approach, which helps to reduce the conservatism for the large envelope and guarantees satisfactory tracking performances with strong robustness simultaneously within the whole envelope. The constraint condition of the fuzzy baseline controller is provided in the form of linear matrix inequality（LMI）, and it specifies the satisfactory tracking performances in the absence of uncertainties. The adaptive increment ensures the uniformly ultimately bounded（UUB） predication errors to recover satisfactory responses in the presence of uncertainties. Simulation results show that the proposed controller helps to achieve high-accuracy tracking of airspeed and altitude desirable commands with strong robustness to uncertainties throughout the entire flight envelope.