Adaptive Control Design for Underactuated Cranes With Guaranteed Transient Performance: Theoretical Design and Experimental Verification

For antiswing control of underactuated cranes, how to guarantee the converging speed of cranes through control design is essential but still remains unsolved. In this article, the adaptive antiswing control for underactuated gantry cranes with guaranteed transient performance under unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances is investigated. To sovle this problem, a set of filters are proposed to make the backstepping technique applicable for the control of crane systems. Then through variable transformation the position error and swing angel could be guaranteed converging to the origin with a given exponential speed. Hardware experiments are conducted to show that the proposed scheme achieves better control performance over existing methods, and it is illustrated that the proposed control scheme possesses strong robustness to unmodeled uncertainties and external disturbances.