Control of a Double Pendulum Crane System Using PSO-Tuned LQR

A Gantry crane system is commonly used for point to point transportation as well as lowering and lifting of payload. The use of cables for hosting of payload can lead to natural swaying which makes it difficult to perform alignment, fine positioning as well as detrimental to safe and efficient operations. This paper presents a particle swarm optimization (PSO) based linear quadratic regulator (LQR) controller; for position and sway control of a double pendulum crane system. The major problem of designing an LQR controller is that, the Q and R parameter are obtained by trial and error which is quiet laborious. This paper optimized Q and R parameters by using PSO algorithm to obtain the best or optimal results. Simulation studies were carried out on the double pendulum nonlinear crane model which is created in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed controller in terms of reducing the trolley position percentage overshoot, hook oscillation and payload oscillation by 65%, 89.8% and 88.6% respectively.