A new vision-sensorless anti-sway control system for container cranes

Most of conventional anti-sway control systems focus on control schemes with a vision system. Because it has many drawbacks such as difficult maintenance and high cost, a new vision-sensorless anti-sway control system for container cranes is proposed in this paper. The proposed system includes a multivariable state feedback anti-sway controller with an integrator, a sway velocity observer, and a sway angle detection method in which an inclinometer is used instead of the vision system. While conventional researches have used a simple pendulum model (single wire rope), the hoist wire rope structure of a real container crane is considered and the motion of the head block (spreader) is analyzed. An elaborate pilot crane is constructed to verify the performance of the proposed system. It is a 1/4-scaled model of a real rail mounted quayside crane. The feasibility and the performance of the proposed system are synthetically verified on the pilot crane. Also, experiments are carried out on the real container crane (rubber tyred gantry crane) in the commercial site to verify the performance of the proposed control system.