Dynamic event-triggered scheduling and control for vehicle active suspension over controller area network

This paper addresses the problem of event-triggered scheduling and control for active suspension of uncertain quarter vehicle suspension systems over resource-constrained controller area network (CAN). The central aim is to develop an efficient dynamic event-triggered scheduling and control co-design approach for improving suspension performance, while significantly alleviating the resource occupancy over CAN in the simultaneous presence of transmission delays and data losses. To this end, two new dynamic event-triggered schedulers (DETSs) are first developed to orchestrate the transmissions of sensor data packets at each sampling time. One salient feature of the DETSs is that the dynamic variables employed in the relevant triggering laws can unremittingly adjust their values over time, which greatly favors the dynamic scheduling of data transmissions over CAN. Then, tractable criteria for stability and suspension performance analysis as well as criteria for co-designing the desired controllers and DETSs are derived. It is shown that the co-design criteria enable comprehensive trade-off analysis between network quality of service and control quality of performance and communication efficiency. Finally, simulation results for a two-degree-of-freedom quarter vehicle model demonstrate possible improvements on ride comfort, good road holding, limited suspension stroke and actuator force, meanwhile saving a large portion of communication resource expenditure.