Fuzzy-tuned PID Anti-swing Control of Automatic Gantry Crane

Anti-swing control is a well-known term in gantry crane control. It is designed to move the payload of gantry crane as fast as possible while the payload swing angle should be kept as small as possible at the final position. A number of studies have proposed anti-swing control using the well-known proportional, integral, derivative (PID) control method. However, PID controllers cannot always effectively control systems with changing parameters. Some studies have also proposed intelligent-based control including fuzzy control. However, the designers often have to face the problem of tuning many parameters during the design to obtain optimum performance. Thus, a lot of effort has to be taken in the design stage. In this paper Fuzzy-tuned PID controller design for anti-swing gantry crane control is presented. The objective is to design a practical anti-swing control which is simple in the design and also robust. The proposed Fuzzy-tuned PID utilizes fuzzy system as PID gain tuners to achieve robust performance to parameters' variations in the gantry crane. A complex dynamic analysis of the system is not needed. PID controller is firstly optimized in MATLAB using a rough model dynamic of the system which is identified by conducting a simple open-loop experiment. Then, the PID gains are used to guide the range of the fuzzy outputs of the Fuzzy-tuned PID controllers. The experimental results show that the proposed anti-swing controller has satisfactory performance. In addition, the proposed method is straightforward in the design.