ANN-based sensorless anti-swing control of automatic gantry crane systems: Experimental result

Sensor is an indispensable component in feedback control. In anti-swing feedback control of automatic gantry crane system, sensors are normally employed to detect trolley position and payload swing angle. However, sensing the payload motion of a real gantry crane, in particular, is troublesome and often costly since there is hoisting mechanism on parallel flexible cable. Therefore, sensorless anti-swing control method for automatic gantry crane system is proposed in this study. The anti-swing control is performed in feedback control scheme without using real swing angle sensor. Instead soft sensor approach is used to substitute the real swing angle sensor. The soft sensor is designed based on artificial neural network (ANN). Specifically, multilayer feedforward network trained by using back propagation learning algorithm is adopted as soft sensor. An experimental study using lab-scale automatic gantry crane is carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed sensorless anti-swing control. The results show that the proposed sensorless method is effective for payload swing suppression since it gives similar performance to the sensor-based feedback anti-swing control.