Passive control of overhead cranes

This paper focuses on the design of optimal passive controllers for rest-to-rest manoeuvres of flexible structures. The parameters of the passive controller are determined by formulating an optimization problem to minimize the integral of the time absolute error, subject to control constraints. Appropriate outputs are selected which result in a passive input-output transfer functions for the plant. The design technique is first illustrated on the benchmark floating oscillator problem. This technique is then used to design dissipative controllers for models of overhead cranes. The crane is modeled with the wave equation used to represents the dynamics of the cable. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.