Abstract
The steering systems of all-terrain cranes have been developed with various control strategies for the stability and drivability. To optimally control the input steering angle, an accurate mathematical model that represents the actual crane dynamics is required. The derivation of an accurate mathematical model to optimally control the steering angle, however, is difficult since the steering-control strategy generally varies with the magnitude of the crane's longitudinal velocity, and the postures of the crane's working parts vary while it is being driven. To address this problem, this paper proposes an automatic steering-control algorithm that is based on the MPC (model predictive control) with a disturbance observer for all-terrain cranes. The designed disturbance observer of this study was used to estimate the error between the base steering model and the actual crane. A model predictive controller was used for the computation of the optimal steering angle, along with the use of the base steering model with an estimated uncertainty. Performance evaluations of the designed control algorithms were conducted based on a curved-path scenario in the Matlab/Simulink environment. The performance-evaluation results show a sound reference-path-tracking performance despite the large uncertainties.