Position and vibration control for suspended gondola-rope systems. 2nd report Search and tracking control using PSD sensor and gyroscopes.

Abstract

An automatic control method for a suspended gondola-rope system is presented in this paper, employing a position sensor device (PSD) instead of ITV cameras to recognize the relative position relationship between gondola and luminous targets. First, the dynamics of this SMM (Suspended Maneuvering Module) are derived with eight orders of freedom under some assumptions in the three dimensional space. Then employing a PSD which is mounted inside the gondola with a rotational freedom, two dimensional position data can be obtained so as to orient the gondola toward the luminating target automatically and search the targets under vibrational environments due to disturbances for tracking. Some useful techniques using this system are demonstrated for estimating relative positions betwwen the module and the target in static and even during vibration, employing rate gyroscopes in order to increase the vibration control performance .The control methods for swing and torsional vibrations are proposed both by controlling air jets in the on-off PWM manner.