Input shaping-based control schemes for a three dimensional gantry crane

Abstract

The motion induced sway of oscillatory systems such as gantry cranes may decrease the efficiency of production lines. In this thesis, modelling and development of input shaping-based control schemes for a three dimensional (3D) lab-scaled gantry crane are proposed. Several input shaping schemes are investigated in open and closed-loop systems. The controller performances are investigated in terms of trolley position and sway responses of the 3D crane. Firstly, a new distributed Delay Zero Vibration (DZV) shaper is implemented and compared with Zero Vibration (ZV) shaper and Zero Vibration Derivative (ZVD) shaper. Simulation and experimental results show that all the shapers are able to reduce payload sway significantly while maintaining desired position response specifications. Robustness tests with ±20% error in natural frequency show that DZV shaper exhibits asymmetric robustness behaviour as compared to ZV and ZVD shapers. Secondly, as analytical technique could only provide good performance for linear systems, meta-heuristic based input shaper is proposed to reduce sway of a gantry crane which is a nonlinear system. The results show that designing meta-heuristic-based input shapers provides 30% to 50% improvement as compared to the analytical-based shapers. Subsequently, a particle swarm optimization based optimal performance control scheme is developed in closed-loop system. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the controller gives zero overshoot with 60% and 20% improvements in settling time and integrated absolute error value of position response respectively, as compared to a specific designed PID-PID anti swing controller for the lab-scaled gantry crane. It is found that crane control with changing cable length is still a problem to be solved. An adaptive input shaping control scheme that can adapt to variation of cable’s length is developed. Simulation with real crane dimensions and experimental results verify that the controller provides 50% reduction in payload sway for different operational commands with hoisting as compared to the average travel length approach.