Optimal Collaborative Motion Planning of Dual Boom Cranes for Transporting Payloads to Desired Positions and Attitudes

Abstract

With the increasing demands of high-precision hoisting, a growing number of to-be-hoisted large-scale heavy payloads <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">not only</i> need accurate positioning transportation, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">but also</i> require specific attitude adjustments, which mostly relies on dual boom cranes (DBCs) in practice due to their powerful capability. To achieve effective non-horizontal payload hoisting, the two booms of DBCs should reach different positions while guaranteeing safety, high efficiency, and energy conservation, which makes coordinated boom motions particularly difficult. To this end, an optimal collaborative motion planning method for DBCs is proposed in this paper <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">without</i> any linearization, which realizes fast, accurate, and energy-saving payload transportation with swing suppression. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method provides the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">first</i> solution for DBCs to transport payloads to the desired non-horizontal attitudes, and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">simultaneously</i> achieves comprehensive optimization of multiple performance indicators, including transportation time, energy consumption, etc., on the premise of safety. On the theoretical side, novel collaborative auxiliary signal construction and parametric design guarantee the coordination of boom motions, and the solving process of optimal trajectories is simplified through elaborate convex optimization problem reformulation and analysis. At last, the effectiveness and adaptability of the proposed method are verified by hardware experiments under different working requirements.