Active Anti-Sway Control of Multi-Ropes Gantry Cranes with Scale Model Test

Gantry cranes are widely used for transporting containers in industry. Lacking in model tests and practical control strategy, the problem that the load suffers swaying due to disturbances such as wind and inertia still exists for spatial multi-rope gantry cranes. In this paper, a scale model of the complete hoisting system is designed and constructed based on a realistic multi-rope gantry crane prototype. Also, considering various constraints in practice such as the non-negative tension in ropes, dynamics of the hoisting system is analysed and a practical anti-sway control strategy is proposed which consists of a robust adaptive controller and a parallel redundant distribution algorithm of rope tension for decoupling. Comparative experiments on the scale model show that the proposed control strategy achieves significant anti-sway effect, and is feasible to be applied in industrial practice.