Control of Rotary Cranes Using Fuzzy Logic and Time-Delayed Position Feedback Control

Rotary Cranes (Tower Cranes) are common industrial structures that are used in building construction, factories, and harbors. These cranes are usually operated manually. With the size of these cranes becoming larger and the motion expected to be faster, the process of controlling them became dicult without using automatic control methods. In general, the movement of cranes has no prescribed path. Cranes have to be run under dierent operating conditions, which makes closed-loop control preferable.

In this work, two types of controllers are studied: fuzzy logic and time-delayed position feedback controllers. The fuzzy logic controller is introduced first with the idea of split-horizon; that is, to use some fuzzy engines for tracking position and others for damping load oscillations. Then the time-delayed position feedback method is applied. Finally, an attempt to combine these two controllers into a hybrid controller is introduced. Computer simulations are used to verify the performance of these controllers. An experimental setup was built on which the time-delayed position feedback controller was tested. The results showed good performance.