Adaptive Neural Command Filtered Control for Pneumatic Active Suspension With Prescribed Performance and Input Saturation

In this paper, an adaptive neural command filtered backstepping scheme is proposed for the pneumatic active suspension with the vertical displacement constraint of sprung mass and actuator saturation. A quarter car model with a pneumatic spring is first fabricated on the basis of thermodynamic theory to describe the dynamic characteristics. To overcome the lumped unknown nonlinearities and enhance the requirement of modeling precision, the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) are proposed to approximate unknown continuous functions caused by the uncertain body mass and other factors of pneumatic spring. To solve the explosion of complexity problem in the traditional backstepping designs, a proposed command filter control is applied by using the Levant differentiators which approach the derivative of the virtual control signals. Nussbaum gain technique is then incorporated into the controller to avoid the problem of the completely unknown control gain and control directions of a pneumatic actuator. In addition, the prescribed performance function (PPF) is suggested to guarantee that the tracking error of the sprung mass displacement does not violate the constraint boundaries. Based on the command filtered backstepping control with PPF, the Lyapunov theorem is then applied to indicate the system stability analysis. Finally, the comparative simulation examples for the pneumatic suspension are given to verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed control.