Semi-active suspension systems have become a widespread tool to improve the handling and comfort of vehicles. These systems require adjustable dampers as well as supplementary sensing elements. In addition to displacements and accelerations, some of the best performing approaches require knowledge of the semi active damper force. Since this variable can be difficult and expensive to measure, several estimation methods have been proposed. In this article, two Linear-Parameter-Varying $H_{\infty }$ (LPV-$H_{\infty }$) filters are developed to estimate the Semi-Active (SA) damper force, considering two different combinations of sensing elements: the first configuration is more expensive, but potentially more accurate and reliable; whereas the second configuration is cheaper and arguably less reliable. Thanks to the use of LPV-$H_{\infty }$ theory, both filters are designed to account for the main nonlinear phenomena of SA dampers (i.e. saturation, hysteresis, etc.), as well as being quadratically stable, robust to the road disturbances and optimized to reduce the estimation error in a specified frequency band. Simulations and experimental data are used to assess the proposed estimators as well as a typical inverse-dynamics estimation approach. The results show that while both of the proposed estimators yield a good degree of accuracy, there are indeed fundamental differences depending on the available sensing elements; a conclusion which could be crucial to appropriately define the instrumentation of semi-active suspension systems.

半主动悬架系统已成为改善车辆操控性和舒适性的广泛工具。这些系统需要可调节的阻尼器以及辅助传感元件。除了位移和加速度之外，一些性能最佳的方法还需要了解半主动阻尼力。由于这个变量测量起来既困难又昂贵，因此已经提出了几种估计方法。在本文中，两个Linear-Parameter-Variing $H_{\infty }$(液化石油气-$H_{\infty }$) 滤波器用于估计半主动( SA ) 阻尼力，考虑到传感元件的两种不同组合：第一种配置更昂贵，但可能更准确和可靠；而第二种配置更便宜，并且可以说不太可靠。由于使用LPV -$H_{\infty }$从理论上讲，这两个滤波器都旨在解决SA阻尼器的主要非线性现象（即饱和、滞后等），并且具有二次稳定、对道路干扰具有鲁棒性并经过优化以减少指定频带内的估计误差. 模拟和实验数据用于评估所提出的估计器以及典型的逆动力学估计方法。结果表明，虽然两个提议的估计器都产生了很好的准确度，但根据可用的传感元件，确实存在根本差异。一个结论对于适当定义半主动悬架系统的仪表可能至关重要。