Model Based Trajectory Control of an Overhead Travelling Crane

Abstract

AbstractUntil now, most papers concerning control of overhead travelling cranes have only focussed on position control of the translational degrees of freedom, see for example [1], [3], [4], and [5]. With more advanced robotic applications envisaged, however, there is a demand for both trajectory control in six degrees of freedom and active damping of the weakly damped load oscillations due to the rope suspension [2]. Hence, a model based trajectory control is presented for an overhead travelling crane that has been upgraded with an orientation unit providing three additional axes. Starting from a central multibody model, decentralised design models are derived for each crane axis. By this, couplings between the axes are identified and appear as disturbance inputs in these decentralised design models. Each decentralised axis controller consists of linear state feedback, feedforward control, and observer based disturbance compensation and is derived in symbolic form. This allows for an adaptation of the complete control structure employing the gain scheduling technique with respect to varying system parameters like rope length and load mass. Couplings between the crane axes are compensated by feedforward control, whereas the e.ects of nonlinear friction forces are counteracted by combination of feedforward control and disturbance estimation. Experimental results, taken at a 5 t ‐ bridge crane, show the bene.ts of the proposed control scheme as regards control performance and steady‐state accuracy.