A tower crane tracking control method with swing suppression

As an efficient transportation tool, the tower crane is widely used in construction production. To improve the working efficiency, some automatic control methods have been proposed for the tower crane system, including some open loop methods, like input shaping methods, trajectory planning methods, and so on. However, generally, tower cranes usually work in outdoor environment, which are sensitive to unavoidable external disturbances. Considering these factors, in this paper, we propose an effective tracking control method, which achieves proper tracking performance. Specifically, utilizing the passivity property, a shaped energy-like function is designed as a Lyapunov function candidate, based on which, an adaptive tracking controller is proposed. Using the Lyapunov stability analysis, together with the LaSalle's invariance principle, the closed-loop system is proven to be asymptotically stable. At last, a series of simulation tests are implemented to illustrate the satisfactory performance of the proposed method.