Optimal Trajectory Planning and Safety-Critical Control for Underactuated Overhead Cranes

As a kind of heavy cargo lifting equipment, it is very important to improve transportation efficiency, save energy and strictly ensure safety for overhead cranes. However, many traditional control strategies can not meet these needs simultaneously. To this end, a composite control framework made up of optimal trajectory planning and Safety-Critical tracking controller is studied in this paper. Specifically, optimal trajectories are obtained by the optimal control technique. Hamiltonian analysis is used to obtain a tractable optimal solution for overhead crane system. Then, control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and high-order control barrier functions (HOCBFs) are used to track the optimal states and account for constraints with arbitrary relative degrees, respectively. The CBF method is computationally efficient while providing safety guarantees. Simulation results show that the proposed method is effective.