Prediction of Nonlinear Oscillations in a Jumping Quarter-Car Model Using Reservoir Computing

Abstract

Reliable prediction of vehicle dynamics is essential for smart driving applications such as autonomous control and advanced driver-assistance systems. Off-road vehicles used in agricultural and construction settings are particularly prone to nonlinear behavior, including bifurcations and chaotic motion arising from intermittent loss of tire--road contact. Predicting such dynamics is challenging because it requires resolving both smooth nonlinearities and the discontinuous switching associated with contact loss. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of reservoir computing (RC) -- specifically an echo state network (ESN) -- for data-driven prediction of a jumping quarter-car model. The reservoir is trained on time-series data from a small number of points and evaluated on its ability to reconstruct bifurcation diagrams, phase-space attractors, and time trajectories across periodic and chaotic regimes. The trained reservoir qualitatively reproduces the period-doubling route to chaos, captures the geometric structure of periodic and chaotic attractors. These results demonstrate that reservoir computing is a feasible data-driven predictor of nonlinear dynamics in a practical, non-smooth vehicle system.