Anti-sway fixed-order control of bridge cranes with varying rope length

In this paper, a gain-scheduling control law is proposed to attenuate the oscillations in overhead cranes induced by manual operations, for different values of the rope length. To take into account the practical limits in controller implementation, a fixed-order controller is tuned, by enforcing certain robustness and performance constraints. The proposed strategy is experimentally tested on a real bridge crane and compared to a time-invariant solution.