Anti-Swing Control in an Underactuated Dual Overhead Crane

Overhead cranes are well-known transportation systems used in industrial environments for carrying heavy loads from one location to another. One of the common problems in such systems is the control of the payload swing given their underactuated dynamics. Such problems have been studied in literature over the past two decades. However, the growing demand for increasing payload capacity in such systems warrants the study of a related system, namely the dual overhead crane. The dual overhead crane is meant to perform the same function yet is meant for carrying heavier loads. However, the system dynamics involves strong internal couplings and more nonlinearities than a single cart overhead crane and this makes the corresponding controller design and stability analysis difficult. Moreover, the controller design has to account for the coordination amongst both the carts in the crane system. In this paper, an adaptive control strategy is proposed which ensures anti-swing control for the dual overhead crane system. Lyapunov theory and LaSalle's invariance theorem are used for demonstrating closed-loop stability of the system without any approximations. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated via numerical simulations.