Control of Tower Cranes With Double-Pendulum Payload Dynamics

The usefulness of cranes is limited because the payload is supported by an overhead suspension cable that allows oscillation to occur during crane motion. Under certain conditions, the payload dynamics may introduce an additional oscillatory mode that creates a double pendulum. This paper presents an analysis of this effect on tower cranes. This paper also reviews a command generation technique to suppress the oscillatory dynamics with robustness to frequency changes. Experimental results are presented to verify that the proposed method can improve the ability of crane operators to drive a double-pendulum tower crane. The performance improvements occurred during both local and teleoperated control.