Anti-Sway Control System Design for the Container Crane

The sway control problem of the pendulum motion of the container crane hanging on the trolley, which transports containers from the container ship to the truck, is considered in this paper. In the container crane control problem, the main issue is to suppress the residual swing motion of the container at the end of the acceleration, deceleration or the case of that the unexpected disturbance input exists. For this problem, in general, the trolley motion control strategy is introduced and applied to real plants. In this paper, we suggest a new type of swing motion control system for a crane system in which a small auxiliary mass is installed on the spreader. The actuator reacting against the auxiliary mass applies inertial control forces to the spreader of the container crane to reduce the swing motion in the desired manner. In this paper, we consider that the length of the rope varies is we design the anti-sway control system based on LMI(linear matrix inequality) approach. And, it will be shown that the proposed control strategy is useful and it can be easily applicable to the real world. So, in this study, we investigate usefulness of the proposed anti-sway system and evaluate system performance from simulation and experimental studies.