Adaptive Robust Sliding-Mode Control of a Semi-active Seat Suspension Featuring a Variable Inertance-Variable Damping Device

This article introduces a novel mechanical variable inertance-variable damping (VIVD) seat suspension based on an adaptive robust sliding-mode (ARSM) controller, including its characteristics validation and performance experiment. In this paper, a variable damping (VD) device and a flywheel are connected in series to form a variable inertance (VI) device with real-time controllable inertance, which is connected in parallel with another VD device to form a VIVD device. A two-layer control scheme is proposed where an upper desired controller is designed based on adaptive robust sliding-mode control and the desired control force is calculated; then a force tracking control strategy with energy priority storage (EPS) is designed as the lower layer controller. Under road random excitation, the VIVD seat suspension exhibits 21.89% and 9.56% lower RMS acceleration values compared to the passive seat suspension and a semi-active traditional sliding-mode control seat suspension. The new system demonstrates advantages in controllability and energy efficiency, with energy consumption falling within the milliwatt range. The proposed semi-active VIVD device shows potential in vehicle vibration control.