Control of a gantry crane: A reach control approach

We investigate synthesis of piecewise affine feedback controllers to achieve an aggressive maneuver for a gantry crane operating in a cluttered environment. The methodology is based on formulating the problem as a reach control problem on a polytopic state space. The boundaries of this polytope arise from the safety constraints imposed by the environment. We show that these theoretical tools can be merged with an iterative control synthesis method to obtain an aggressive, albeit safe and robust, maneuver without the need for a predefined open-loop trajectory.