Cooperative control system of the floating cranes for the dual lifting

This paper proposes a dual lifting and its cooperative control system with two different kinds of floating cranes. The Mega-erection and Giga-erection in the ship building are used to handle heavier and wider blocks and modules as ships and off-shore platforms are enlarged. However, there is no equipment to handle such Tera-blocks. In order to overcome the limit on performance of existing floating cranes, the dual lifting is proposed in this research. In the dual lifting, two floating cranes are well-coordinated to add up the lift capabilities of both cranes without any loss such that virtually a single crane is lifting, maneuvering and unloading. Two main constraints for the dual lifting are as follows: First, two barges of floating cranes should be constrained as a rigid body not to cause a relative motion between two barges and main hooks of the two cranes should be controlled as main hooks of a single crane. In order words, it is necessary to develop the cooperative control of two floating cranes in order to sustain a center of gravity of the module and minimize the tilting angle during the lifting and unloading by the two floating cranes. Two floating cranes are handled as a master-slave system. The master crane is able to gather information about all working conditions and make a decision to control the individual hook speed, which communicates the slave crane by TCP/IP. The developed control system has been embedded in the real floating crane systems and the dual lifting has been demonstrated five times at SHI shipyard in 2015. The moving angles of the lifting module are analyzed and verified to be suitable for hoisting control. It is verified that the dual lifting can be applied for many heavier and wider blocks and modules to shorten the construction time of ships and off-shore platforms.