Horizontal positioning and anti-swinging control tower crane using adaptive sliding mode control

As a non-linear underactuated system, the tower crane should be controlled to transport the load to reference position quickly and smoothly. The actual tower crane is susceptible to the environment interference during operation. Conventional Proportion Integral Derivative (PID) controller cannot deal with this interference. Sliding mode control (SMC) is robust to system uncertainties and external disturbances, but it needs to know the upper bounds of uncertainties and external perturbations, which are usually unknown in practical systems. Adaptive backstepping sliding mode control (ABSMC) is used to adaptively estimate the uncertainties and external disturbances, and the stability of the system is proved based on Lyapunov theory. Compared with SMC, the proposed ABSMC has strong robustness.