First-Order Active Disturbance Rejection-Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning Control of Tower Crane Systems

The current paper combines the main features of first-order Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) with Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning (VRFT) to automatically determine the parameters of the controller without the process model. The development of the resulted data-driven algorithm, called first-order ADRC-VRFT algorithm, is exemplified in the control of cart position, arm angular position and payload position of three-degree-of-freedom tower crane systems (TCSs) using three Single Input-Single Output (SISO) loops that are running in parallel. The three SISO first-order ADRC-VRFT algorithms benefit from a twofold validation using experiments on real-time TCS equipment: model-free (without the process model) and also model-based (making use of the process model). The algorithms are also compared in terms of the experimental results by considering an objective function as performance index.