• Journal of Forest and Environmental Science
• /
• v.38 no.4
• /
• pp.239-248
• /
• 2022

Forestry crane work in a forest harvester or forwarder is regarded as one of most hard work requiring a very high level of operation skill. The operator must handle two or more multi-axes joysticks simultaneously to control the multiple manipulators for maneuvering the crane-tip to its intended location. This study has been carried out to develop a crane-tip controller which can intuitively maneuver the crane-tip, resulting in improving the productivity by decreasing the technical difficulty of control as well as reducing the workload. The crane-tip controller consists of a single 2-axis joystick and a control algorithm run on microcontroller. Lab-scale forestry crane was constructed using electric cylinders. The crane-tip control algorithm has the crane-tip follow the waypoints generated on the given path considering the dead band region using LBO (Lateral Boundary Offset). A speed control gain to change the speed of relevant cylinders relatively is applied as well. By the P (Proportional) control within the control interval of 20 msec, the average error of crane-tip control on the predefined straight path turned out to be 14.5 mm in all directions. When the joystick is used the waypoints are generated in real time by the direction signal from the joystick. In this case, the average error of path control was 12.4 mm for straight up, straight forward and straight down movements successively at a certain constant speed setting. In the slant movement of crane-tip by controlling two axes of joystick simultaneously, the movement of crane-tip was controlled in the average error of 15.9 mm when the crane-tip is moved up and down while moving toward forward direction. It concluded that the crane-tip control was possible using the control algorithm developed in this study.

• Journal of Korean Society of Forest Science
• /
• v.111 no.2
• /
• pp.287-301
• /
• 2022

This study aims to propose a crane-tip control method to intuitively control the end-effector vertically or horizontally for improving the crane work efficiency and to confirm the control performance. To verify the control performance based on experimental variables, a laboratory-scale crane was manufactured using an electric cylinder. Through a forward and reverse kinematics analysis, the crane was configured to output the position coordinates of the current crane-tip and the joint angle at each target point. Furthermore, a method of generating waypoints was used, and a dead band using lateral boundary offset (LBO) was set. Appropriate parameters were selected using bang-bang control, which confirmed that the number of waypoints and LBO radius were associated with positioning error, and the cylinder speed was related to the lead time. With increased number of waypoints and decreased LBO radius, the positioning error and the lead time also decreased as the cylinder speed decreased. Using the proportional control, when the cylinder velocity was changed at every control cycle, the lead time was greatly reduced; however, the actual control pattern was controlled by repeating over and undershoot in a large range. Therefore, proportional control was performed by additionally applying velocity gain that can relatively change the speed of each cylinder. Since the control performed with in a range of 10 mm, it was verified th at th e crane-tip control can be ach ieved with only th e proportional control to which the velocity gain was applied in a control cycle of 20 ms.