Load Swing Reduction in Manually Operated Bridge Cranes

In this paper, a procedure for control system design of an anti-sway system for manually operated bridge cranes is presented. Specifically, the human operator acts by means of a push-button panel to operate the crane and thus is considered as a disturbance to the closed loop control system that regulates to zero the angle of the load cable with respect to the vertical axis. Closed loop control has been made possible by the use of an inertial sensor and an Extended Kalman Filter which provides accurate angle estimation. An accurate multi-body model has been realized using the Automatic Dynamic Analysis of Mechanical System (ADAMS) environment. The model parameters have been tuned by system identification based on real measurements. Finally, the model is used to design a Sliding Mode Controller to suppress the load swing angle.