Abstract
A systematic approach is developed for determining a control input for the point-to-point control of an overhead crane that exhibits temporal variation of rope length in addition to damping and nonlinearity, without inducing residual vibration. Complete suppression of the residual vibration is achieved by eliminating the natural frequency component of the cargo from the apparent external force, which is defined to include the effects of damping, nonlinearity, and parameter variation. Furthermore, an effective technique previously proposed by the authors for improving robustness to the modeling error of the natural frequency is extended. Numerical simulation results show that, even when cargo is hoisted up or down during operation, the proposed method realizes accurate positioning of the cargo without inducing residual vibration and sufficiently improves robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first frequency-domain robust open-loop control strategy that ensures a theoretical zero amplitude for residual vibration in the absence of modeling error in nonlinear crane hoisting operation. The developed method is not only a contribution to the realization of low-cost and efficient crane hoisting operation, but is also applicable to the control of other nonlinear damped systems that include time-varying parameters.