Unified \mathcal Observer for a Class of Nonlinear Lipschitz Systems: Application to a Real ER Automotive Suspension

This letter presents an extension of the synthesis of a unified H ∞ observer for a specific class of nonlinear systems. The objectives are to decouple the effects of bounded unknown input disturbances and to minimize the effects of measurement noises on the estimation errors of the state variables by using H ∞ criterion, while the nonlinearity is bounded through a Lipschitz condition. This new method is developed to estimate the damping force of an electro-rheological (ER) damper in an automotive suspension system, and is implemented on the INOVE testbench from GIPSA-Lab (1/5-scaled real vehicle) for real-time performance assessment. Both simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed observer to estimate the damper force in realtime, face to measurement noises and road disturbances.