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Autonomous Overhead Crane System Using a Fuzzy Logic Controller

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DOI: 10.1177/1077546304042038

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Journal of Vibration and Control
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Autonomous Overhead Crane System Using a Fuzzy Logic Controller


F. Omar, F. Karray, O. Basir and L. Yu
Journal of Vibration and Control 2004; 10; 1255
DOI: 10.1177/1077546304042038

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© 2004 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Autonomous Overhead Crane System Using a Fuzzy
Logic Controller

F. OMAR
F. KARRAY
O. BASIR
L. YU
Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada, N2L 3G1

(Received 20 July 20021 accepted 20 May 2003)

Abstract: This paper pertains to advanced automation of the load transfer process using overhead cranes.
Overhead cranes are widely used in various areas of industry, including manufacturing, construction, ship-
ping, etc. Load transfer operations using overhead cranes have to be performed fast and safely. As such,
these operations are handled by expert operators1 however, the demand for an automatic consistent and re-
liable crane operation is on the rise. The crane–load system is highly nonlinear and time-varying, hence,
solutions considering model-base approaches may lead to a complicated controller structure. Such a con-
troller may require accurate estimation of the crane system parameters. In this paper we present a new fuzzy
logic controller for overhead crane operation. The fuzzy controller is designed based on knowledge of an ex-
pert crane operator, and does not require any parameter estimation. It mimics the operator behavior by using
the same crane–load system states that are realized by the operator. These states are the trolley position er-
ror and the load sway angle. The fuzzy controller action, on the other hand, is the desired trolley speed. The
proposed controller is implemented and tested on a small-scale overhead crane. Experimental results show
robust operation of the fuzzy controller as compared with that of a conventional controller.

Key Words: Overhead crane, fuzzy logic controller, autonomous crane system

1. INTRODUCTION

Overhead cranes are widely used in industry for load transfer. Their size and capacity vary
according to their applications. In most of the applications, the transfer has to be performed
as fast as possible. Such fast motion would induce undesirable sway, which may cause
load damage and other types of hazards, and hence reduces the operation efficiency. As
such, skilled operators control most of today’s industrial cranes to achieve fast operation
while dampening any induced sway. Development of an autonomous load transfer system is
certainly a challenging task. The difficulty is not only limited to the system nonlinearity but
also to the wide variation in system parameters (e.g. load and rope length changes).
In recent years, intensive research work has focused on developing control techniques
towards anti-sway load transfer. Most of the developed control techniques are model-based

Journal of Vibration and Control, 10: 1255–1270, 2004 DOI: 10.1177/1077546304042038


1
12004 Sage Publications

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1256 F. OMAR ET AL.

with varying degrees of complexity. The main control objective is to transfer load while
maintaining a sway-damped operation. Some early attempts suggested using open-loop con-
trol techniques (Starr, 19851 Noakes and Jansen, 1992). In these approaches, a desired trolley
acceleration trajectory is first programmed, then the trolley is forced to follow that trajectory.
The trajectory profile consists of periods of acceleration, constant velocity, and deceleration.
The accuracy of such control techniques is greatly affected by load and rope length changes.
Simple feedback control approaches can be used in simple crane systems where load
and rope length do not vary significantly. Ridout (1989a) used a linear feedback controller
for sway damping1 however, satisfactory performance was limited to a small range of loads.
To improve the controller performance, Ridout (1989b) replaced the damping gain of the
feedback loop by a function that depends on the crane system states. Applications of other
types of adaptive control techniques were also proposed. Salminen et al. (1990) used an
adaptive type of pole placement controller based on the polynomial time-discrete approach.
Boustany and d’Andrea-Novel (1992) used an adaptive control technique based on feedback
linearization1 however, only simulation results were presented.
Moustafa and Ebeid (1988) derived a nonlinear dynamic model that considers travel and
transverse motions of the crane. Later, Lee (1998) expanded it to a three-dimensional (3D)
dynamic model that considers all crane motions including load hoisting. Lee then linearized
the model around the stable equilibrium and used it to design an anti-sway control law for
constant rope length. To accommodate rope length changes, Lee suggested using a gain
scheduling method. Recently, Vikramaditya and Rajamani (2000) have used a nonlinear
controller based on a modified sliding-surface formulation.
Other researchers considered optimal control approaches where the controller gain is cal-
culated based on minimizing a cost function. Sakawa and Shindo (1982) suggested a control
method where first the load motion trajectory is divided into five segments. Then, an optimal
control law is computed for each segment such that swinging is minimized while satisfying
a number of constrains. Yamada et al. (1983) used suboptimal velocity patterns produced
by a bang–bang trolley acceleration profile that was considered to be a time optimal pattern.
A similar approach was also reported by Auernig and Troger (1987). Recently, Ong et al.
(1999) have developed a minimum time controller for a two-dimensional (2D) crane system
that considers load transverse and hoisting motion. However, their approach considers sway
damping only at the end of the load transfer. It has been noticed that all optimal control ap-
proaches require precise information of the crane system parameters. Approximating these
parameters may not result in any optimal operation. In general, model-based controllers de-
pend greatly on model accuracy and many of them demand heavy computation requirement
during control cycle.
To accommodate crane system nonlinearity and parameter variations, researchers have
recently directed their attention to fuzzy logic control. Fuzzy logic control based approaches
have shown good results in many industrial applications (de Silva, 1995). Nalley and Trabia
(1994) used a distributed fuzzy controller for load transfer and sway damping. Their con-
troller consists of two parallel fuzzy controllers: one for the load transfer and another for
the sway damping. The control action is then computed by adding the two controller out-
puts. Lee and Cho (2001) applied a similar idea1 however, their fuzzy controller is used only
to control the load sway. A separate servo controller is used to control the trolley motion.
Their sway damping controller, however, uses the sway angle and its derivative to provide

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1257

a corrective action as a control voltage. Although comparable simulation results were pre-
sented, such a distributed controller would overlook the coupling effect of the crane system
dynamics. Later, Gutierrez and Soto (1998) used one fuzzy controller to transfer load while
dampening any induced load swinging. However, their controller fuzzy rules are based on a
hypothetical profile of the trolley acceleration. Such a fuzzy controller may not realistically
represent expert operator maneuvers. Moreover, the system was not tested for different loads
and rope lengths.
The idea of applying the fuzzy logic control approach is to mimic expert operator actions
by extracting this knowledge and to list them as fuzzy rules. As such, the inputs and outputs
of the fuzzy controller have to match those realized by the expert operator. A crane operator
naturally would evaluate the trolley position and the load sway angle. His action, on the
other hand, would be how fast to move the trolley and in which direction. In this paper
we present a realization of such a fuzzy controller and its implementation in an industrial
prototype overhead crane. In Section 2 we present an autonomous overhead crane system and
in Section 3 we detail the design process of the fuzzy logic controller. The overhead crane
prototype is presented in Section 4. In Section 5 we describe a cascaded PID controller which
is used to control the overhead crane. Comparison between the proposed fuzzy controller and
the cascaded PID controller is presented in Section 6.

2. AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM

A research project is being carried out in the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(PAMI) Laboratory of the University of Waterloo, which aims to develop an innovative tech-
nology that will be applicable for autonomous operation of a wide range of overhead cranes.
Currently, expert overhead crane operators are required to perform fast and safe load transfer.
In most large overhead cranes, the operating room is attached to the trolley and the operator
has to monitor the payload and drive the crane as fast as possible while minimizing load
swinging. As such, the operation efficiency depends greatly on the operator experience and
vigilance. Such an obstacle can be overcome by developing an autonomous crane system
such that only initial and final positions need to be provided, e.g. by using a laser-targeting
device. Figure 1 shows a schematic diagram of an autonomous overhead crane system.
The application of fuzzy logic control is very suitable in this case, since the overhead
crane is a time-varying system. Moreover, robust knowledge of crane operations is available
in the form of expert knowledge. The idea here is to develop a control system that mimics
the control actions of an expert operator but at a fast pace and under better safety conditions.
The control system should have a generic structure that is independent of system parameter
changes (e.g. payload weight, trolley weight, rope length, etc.). The use of a laser-targeting
device would reduce the need to follow the load1 however, an automatic load-clutching de-
vice is still required to achieve full autonomous operation. The proposed crane operation,
e.g. in the downloading operation, is divided into the following three steps.
1. Hoisting step. The crane picks up the load from a defined zone and hoists it to a height
slightly above the target location.
2. Transferring step. The load is transferred as fast as possible with minimum swinging.
3. Lowering step. The payload is lowered and released.

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1258 F. OMAR ET AL.

123456 78 9 6 2 2 35   245 6  6 56 5 6 8

All these steps can be executed by just identifying the target location using the laser-
targeting device. In the next section we present the development of the fuzzy logic controller.

3. FUZZY LOGIC CONTROLLER DESIGN

In order to design a fuzzy logic controller for overhead crane application, knowledge of the
crane operation should be gathered and recorded in the form of fuzzy rules. The number
of these rules should be kept small for fast computation. One way of achieving this is by
assuming that the crane system consists of two decoupled subsystems, each of which can
be controlled separately. This assumption is valid and can be proved by analyzing the crane
dynamics. This is detailed in the next section.

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1259

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3.1. Crane Dynamics

Ideally the crane system should have eight degrees of freedom. However, load-rotational
modes are rarely induced and therefore can be ignored. Also, the rope length is considered
constant during load transfer, as described in the proposed crane operation in the previous
section. In fact, in many applications the hoisting and lowering take only a fraction of the
transfer time and are usually performed at the beginning and the end of the load transfer.
Hence, the system dynamics can be described in terms of the generalized coordinates, xt ,
yt , 1 x and 1 y , as shown in Figure 2. The load position can be expressed in terms of these
coordinates as
1 2
xl 1 x t 2 l sin 21 x 3 cos 1 y
1 2
yl 1 yt 2 l sin 1 y (1)
1 2
zl 1 3l cos 21 x 3 cos 1 y

where 1 x is the sway angle projection on a plane parallel to the X Z plane, while 1 y is the
angle between the rope and that plane. x t and yt are the trolley coordinates and l is the rope
length. Accordingly, the load velocity is simply the derivative of equation (1) as

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1260 F. OMAR ET AL.

1 2 1 2
x4l 1 x4t 2 l 14 x cos 21 x 3 cos 1 y 3 l 14 y sin 21 x 3 sin 1 y
1 2
y4l 1 y4t 2 l 14 y cos 1 y (2)
1 2 1 2
z4l 1 l 14 x sin 21 x 3 cos 1 y 2 l 14 y cos 21 x 3 sin 1 y 4

The equations of motion can be derived using the Lagrangian approach. The system kinetic
and potential energies are given as

11 2 1 1 2
T 1 Mx x4t2 2 M y y4t2 2 m x4l2 2 y4l2 2 z4l2 (3)
2 2
1 2
P 1 3mg cos 21 x 3 cos 1 y (4)

where Mx and M y are the effective translating inertia in the x and y directions, respectively,
which include all the equivalent masses of the rotating parts contributing to the inertia in
each direction. Hence, the Lagrangian can be written as

11 2 1 1 2 1 2
L1T3P1 Mx x4t2 2 M y y4t2 2 m x4l2 2 y4l2 2 z4l2 2 mg cos 21 x 3 cos 1 y 4 (5)
2 2
Hence the equations of motion are
3 4
d 5L 5L
3 1 Fx (6)
dt 5 x4t 5 xt
3 4
d 5L 5L
3 1 0 (7)
dt 5 14 x 51 x
3 4
d 5L 5L
3 1 Fy (8)
dt 5 y4t 5 yt
3 4
d 5L 5L
3 1 04 (9)
dt 5 14 y 51 y

The equations of motion can be obtained by substituting equations (2) and (5) into equations
(6)–(9), and carrying out all the differentiations. Further, the equations of motion can be lin-
earized about the equilibrium position by considering small sway angle. The final linearized
equations are

2Mx 2 m3 x5t 2 ml 15 x 1 Fx (10)

x5t 2 l 15 x 2 g1 x 1 0 (11)

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1261

123456 8 96 56566 2 423 4 32 5658

1 2
M y 2 m y5t 2 ml 15 y 1 Fy (12)

y5t 2 l 15 y 2 g1 y 1 04 (13)

It is clear from the crane equations of motion that the crane system consists of two decoupled
subsystems, each including two coupled modes. Therefore, each subsystem can be controlled
separately. However, we still cannot ignore the coupling effect between the translation and
pendulum modes within each subsystem.

3.2. Controller Fuzzy Variables and Fuzzy Rules

Considering the advantages of having two decoupled subsystems, the fuzzy controller is di-
vided into two identical parallel controllers, each controlling one direction including the trol-
ley position error and the sway angle in that direction. As stated earlier, our fuzzy controller
is based on crane operator experience and as such sway angle and trolley position errors are
considered as inputs (condition variables) to the fuzzy controller, while the trolley reference
speed is taken as the output (action variable). The trolley should track the reference speed
accurately. This can be achieved by providing a driving force using a PI speed controller.
Figure 3 presents a schematic diagram of the controlled crane system. Details of the fuzzy
controller are shown in Figure 4. It should be noted here that the fuzzy controller is used
primarily to perform load transfer tasks, as such D in Figure 4 is always positive number
and any disturbance incident should be considered as a part of the transfer task. Also, 1 max
represents the maximum allowable sway angle as specified by the operation requirements
the particular crane and environment.
The condition variables are normalized to maintain a minimum number of fuzzy rules,
while providing the same resolution for all ranges of load transfer tasks. Five member-
ship functions are selected for each condition variable, while 13 membership functions
compose the action variable, as indicated in Figure 5. These membership functions are

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1262 F. OMAR ET AL.

123456 8 6 2   6 5 6 4 5658

 6 78 14 546   6 5 6 65 28


Position error
NL NM ZR PM PL
NL NVL NML NL NL PM
NM NML NL NM NM PM
Sway angle ZR NL NS ZR PS PL
PM NM PM PM PL PML
PL NM PL PL PML PVL

called negative very large (NVL), negative medium large (NML), negative large (NL), neg-
ative medium (NM), negative small (NS), negative very small (NVS), zero (ZR), positive
very small (PVS), positive small (PS), positive medium (PM), positive large (PL), positive
medium large (PML), and positive very large (PVL). The large number of the action variable
membership functions is required to accommodate sway damping during travel. However,
this does not affect the number of fuzzy rules. The action variable is also normalized and
represents a fraction of a maximum speed that is read from a lookup table. The lookup table
produces a maximum speed that is suitable for each transfer task range. This lookup table
is necessary here since a crane operator would adjust the trolley speed according to the task
range of operation.
As illustrated in Figure 5, the membership functions of the action variable are tuned
to provide good resolution at high speed for better sway damping control. The fuzzy rules
are listed based on the following strategy. If the trolley position error is high (which means
the trolley just started to move), then high speed is required and the position error is more
important. If the position error is medium (the trolley is already at motion), then sway
damping is more important, and if the position error is zero, then both position error and sway
damping are equally important. For each rule of this strategy, three fuzzy rules are extracted
based on sway angle level. The complete list of the controller fuzzy rules is summarized in
Table 1.

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1263

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4. OVERHEAD CRANE PROTOTYPE

To validate the proposed fuzzy control approach, a computer controlled overhead crane pro-
totype is constructed. The crane has a working space of 3 6 1.5 m2 and load hoisting of
up to 1.5 m. Figure 6 shows a picture of the overhead crane prototype. The prototype is
equipped with three DC brushed motors: one is used for driving the beam, one for the trol-
ley, and one for load lift. Each electric motor has an optical encoder feedback system. An
additional sensor is mounted at the pivot point of the load cable on the trolley. This sensor
enable the measurement of angular deflection in both x and y directions independently. The
crane control is achieved using a Pentium 100MHz PC equipped with Matlab and the Real-
Time Workshop. All three encoder channels and the sway sensor signals are sampled at a
frequency of 100 Hz. The servo amplifiers for the beam and trolley drive motors operate in
voltage control mode while the servo amplifier for the winch motor operates in current con-
trol mode. The fuzzy controller is implemented on the crane prototype through the Matlab
environment. A cascaded PID controller is also implemented on the crane system to compare
it with the fuzzy logic controller. Details of the cascaded PID controller are described next.

5. DESIGN OF THE CASCADED PID CONTROLLER

Appling a single loop PID controller to drive the overhead crane would lead to very poor
results. Alternatively, a cascade control technique is used to achieve better performance as
compared with a single loop controller (Vahedipour and Bobis, 19931 Zhuang and Atherton,
1994). The cascaded controller is divided into two parallel controllers, each controlling one
direction, similar to the fuzzy controller. Each controller includes two main control loops:
one inner loop for trolley velocity control, and one outer loop for trolley position control.
An additional sway feedback loop is introduced between the two main control loops, as

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1264 F. OMAR ET AL.

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1265

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illustrated in Figure 7. However, tuning such a cascaded controller is rather difficult and
very few investigations have been reported on this aspect (Zhuang and Atherton, 1994). The
usual procedure for designing a cascade PID controller is to tune the inner loop first, and
then tune the outer loop while considering the resulting closed inner loop system (Wang et
al., 1993).
The cascaded PID controller is implemented on the overhead crane prototype and tuned
for the shortest practically possible rope length. It was found that tuning the system at the
shortest used rope length gives the best overall performance results. The controller tuning
is achieved by first adjusting the inner PI loop until fast step response is achieved with no
overshoot. Then the proportional parameters of the outer loop and the sway feedback are set
simultaneously for fast response. The derivative part is then adjusted to reduce the overshoot
and finally the integral part is tuned to eliminate the steady-state error. Fine-tuning continues
until a good balance between fast response and sway damping is achieved.

6. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND COMPARISON

Experiments are conducted on the crane prototype to transfer two different loads of 6.8 kg
(light load) and 16 kg (heavy load) at three different settings of rope lengths (110, 150, and
190 cm) for distances of 270 and 70 cm in the x and y directions, respectively. Therefore,
each controller performed six load transfers. The same experiments are repeated with an
additional load disturbance introduced as initial sway angles of 2.57 and 27 in the x and y
directions, respectively. Through all these experiments, data representing the trolley position
error and sway angle are collected. Data are plotted and each controller results examined for
fast transfer and sway damping performance both during and at the end of the load transfer.
Figures 8 and 9 compare the performance of the two controllers. These figures show
the load position error as computed using the trolley position error and the sway angle. It
is clear from both figures that the fuzzy controller has a smoother load transfer. It is also
clear that the load and rope length changes have very minimum effect on its performance.
However, the cascaded PID controller is sensitive to the load and rope length changes. The

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1266 F. OMAR ET AL.

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1267

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1268 F. OMAR ET AL.

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best performance of the cascaded PID controller is shown in Figure 9(c) (l = 110) where the
PID controller was tuned for best performance. However, with the light load and for different
rope lengths, the sway damping is not as good as the fuzzy controller. The weakness of the
cascaded PID controller is more apparent when initial disturbance is introduced (2.57 and
27 in the x and y directions, respectively), as illustrated in Figures 10 and 11. It is also
noticeable that the fuzzy controller performed better in the y direction which has a higher
ratio of load to trolley mass, see Figures 8(b), 8(d), 9(b), 9(d), 10(b), 10(d), 11(b), and 11(d).
The sway damping performance can be magnified by plotting only the sway angles, as
shown in Figure 12. It is very clear that there is no effort made by the PID controller to
dampen the sway during the first five seconds. Also, the effects of load and rope length
changes on the PID performance are quite noticeable. This is due to the fact that high po-
sition error is dominating the controller action. Of course, it is possible to increase the
damping effort but this would result in longer transfer time. However, the fuzzy controller
considers sway damping as soon as the crane moves and reaches moderate speed. The fuzzy
controller maintains good responses in most of the tested combinations of load weights and
rope lengths, except the combination of heavy load and shortest rope length, as illustrated in
Figure 12.

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AUTONOMOUS OVERHEAD CRANE SYSTEM 1269

7. CONCLUSION

A new control strategy dealing with overhead crane operations has been developed that is
based on the fuzzy logic approach. The controller includes two identical fuzzy controllers
that work independently considering the decoupling between the crane forward and trans-
verse motions. Each fuzzy controller is based on expert crane operator knowledge for fast
load transfer with minimum sway. The controller action is classified into three parts: at the
beginning, the priority is giving to trolley motion as there is no sway1 once the crane is in
motion, anti-sway becomes more important since the trolley is already in motion1 once the
crane is close to its destination, both anti-sway and trolley position become equally impor-
tant. The fuzzy controller has a generic structure to accommodate a wide range of overhead
cranes. The fuzzy controller was implemented on a prototype of an overhead crane. Experi-
mental results showed consistent performance of the fuzzy controller for different loads and
rope lengths. The fuzzy controller showed good anti-sway performance as compared with
a cascaded PID controller. The developed fuzzy controller can be implemented in various
crane sizes with limited adjustment.
Acknowledgments. This work was supported by a grant from the Materials and Manufacturing Ontario. The authors
wish to thank the staff at Intelligent Mechatronic Systems, Inc., for their support in building the overhead crane
prototype.

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