An Energy-based Nonlinear Coupling Control for Offshore Ship-mounted Cranes

This paper proposes a novel nonlinear energy-based coupling control for an underactuated offshore ship-mounted crane, which guarantees both precise trolley positioning and payload swing suppressing performances under external sea wave disturbance. In addition to having such typical nonlinear underactuated property, as it is well known, an offshore ship-mounted crane also suffers from much unexpected persistent disturbances induced by sea waves or currents, which, essentially different from an overhead crane fixed on land, cause much difficulty in modeling and controller design. Inspired by the desire to achieve appropriate control performance against those challenging factors, in this paper, through carefully analyzing the inherent mechanism of the nonlinear dynamics, we first construct a new composite signal to enhance the coupling behavior of the trolley motion as well as the payload swing in the presence of ship′s roll motion disturbance. Based on which, an energy-based coupling control law is presented to achieve asymptotic stability of the crane control system′s equilibrium point. Without any linearization of the complex nonlinear dynamics, unlike traditional feedback controllers, the proposed control law takes a much simpler structure independent of the system parameters. To support the theoretical derivations and to further verify the actual control performance, Lyapunov-based mathematical analysis as well as numerical simulation/experimental results are carried out, which clarify the feasibility and superior performance of the proposed method over complicated disturbances.