Antiswing Cargo Transportation of Underactuated Tower Crane Systems by a Nonlinear Controller Embedded With an Integral Term

A tower crane is a nonlinear mechatronic system with complicated underactuated characteristics, which is widely used in modern construction sites. At present, most existing methods for tower cranes are proposed by linearizing the original nonlinear dynamics near equilibrium points, which are, thus, prone to suffering from unexpected steady errors due to such factors as unmodeled dynamics, imperfect friction compensation, etc., since they have not included integral terms in either controller design or stability analysis. Therefore, in this paper, an improved feedback controller with an elaborately constructed integral term is proposed for 3-D tower cranes without linearization, which can achieve both antiswing and positioning control while being able to effectively reduce steady errors in the presence of, e.g., inaccurate friction compensation. Furthermore, asymptotic stability results are proven through rigorous theoretical analysis. Owing to no linearization, the proposed controller is applicable when state variables (e.g., cargo swing angles) are not close enough to the equilibrium points, which makes it suitable for complicated working conditions. Hardware experimental results are included to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.