Human operator studies of portable touchscreen crane control interfaces

Controlling a crane is often very difficult for human operators due to the slow response of the heavy structures and the lightly-damped payload oscillation. Manipulation tasks are made even harder when the interface between the human and crane is unintuitive. Although there have recently been significant advancements in portable electronic devices, this useful technology has not migrated into crane control applications. In order to facilitate this technology cross over, this paper presents results from an operator study that evaluated various user interfaces for a touchscreen crane controller.