A Gantry Crane Control Scheme Using Hybrid Input Shaper and PID Controller

Abstract

Gantry crane is a critical system used for point-to-point transportation of a payload in industries, ports, nuclear plants etc. Speed, accuracy and safety are of paramount importance in gantry cranes (GCs) operation. However, operating GCs as fast as possible generally results in payload sway coupled with inaccurate positioning of the load which degrades the speed, accuracy and safety. This work proposed a hybrid control system for sway  suppression and precise trolley positioning in gantry crane systems. The hybrid control system combines Zero-vibration (ZV) and Zero-Vibration Derivative (ZVD) input shapers for sway suppression. Then a Proportional- Integral Derivative (PID) controller is designed for trolley position control. The effectiveness of the hybrid controller was studied and investi-gated by simulating the proposed hybrid ZV-ZVD shaper for sway suppression and the PID controller for precise position control using MATLAB/Simulink. Experimental results show that hybrid ZV-ZVD was able to suppress the pay load sway to 99.69% and the combination of hybrid ZV-ZVD and PID controllers offer precise trolley position control.