Wear Attenuation in Actuators based on a Model-free Adaptive Filter for a Gantry Crane System

Gantry cranes systems are widely used in heavy load transportation industries, which increasingly requires engineering solutions to improve efficiency while considering safety precautions. Aiming to reduce the actuator wear of these systems, this article proposes to add a model-free adaptive filter in the control loop to mitigate the impact of measurement noise on the control signal without compromising the overall closed-loop system performance. The main idea is to avoid the sudden change of the filtered signal when the system output has a derivative not statistically significant when compared to the expected measurement noise. Numerical simulation and experimental validation are performed in a gantry crane system to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the adaptive filter.