Dynamic Event-Triggered Control for Switched Active Vehicle Suspension Systems: Sampled-Data Switching Law Design and HIL Validation

This article investigates the switching control problem of active vehicle suspension systems (AVSSs) operating over a bandwidth-limited controller area network (CAN). To characterize an AVSS under varying operating conditions, it is modeled as a multimode switched system, where each mode corresponds to a specific vehicle body height. On this basis, a design framework relying on multiple time-varying Lyapunov functions is developed to construct a sampled-data, state-dependent switching (SDS) law that alleviates the communication burden on the CAN while improving suspension performance. To further enhance the utilization of communication resources, a dynamic event-triggered scheme (ETS) is proposed, in which data transmission is scheduled using only sampled state information, thereby eliminating the need for continuous monitoring of the triggering condition. Under the proposed switching law and dynamic ETS, a set of numerically tractable sufficient conditions are established that simultaneously guarantees the desired suspension performance and communication efficiency. The proposed strategy is validated through detailed numerical simulations and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments, which demonstrate notable improvements in ride comfort and a significant reduction in communication load. In particular, the HIL experiments show that, under pulse road excitation, the proposed controller achieves a 69.05% reduction in vehicle body acceleration compared with a passive suspension.