Sensorless anti-swing control strategy for automatic gantry crane system: Soft sensor approach

To achieve a good control performance of automatic gantry crane system, sensors are indispensable instrument for feedback signals. However, sensing the payload motion of a real gantry crane, particularly swing motion, is troublesome and often costly. Therefore, a sensorless automatic gantry crane system is developed and proposed in this paper. A soft sensor based on mathematical model of the crane is introduced to substitute the real sensor. In the proposed method, the motion of the payload is estimated based on the mathematical of the crane and the measured trolley position. An experimental study using lab-scale automatic gantry crane is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed soft sensor. The results show that the proposed sensorless anti-swing control strategy is effective for suppressing the swing motion since it gives similar performance to the sensor-based anti-swing control strategy. Moreover, the proposed method has robustness to deal with parameter variations.