Abstract
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 difficult without using automatic control methods. In general, the movement of cranes has no prescribed path. Cranes have to be run under different operating conditions, which makes closed-loop control preferable.
In this work a fuzzy logic controller is introduced with the idea of split-horizon; that is, fuzzy inference engines (FIE) are used for tracking the position and others are used for damping the load oscillations. The controller consists of two independent controllers: radial and rotational. Each of these controllers has two fuzzy inference engines (FTEs). Computer simulations are used to verify the performance of the controller. Three simulation cases are introduced: radial, compound, and damping. The results from the simulations show that the fuzzy controller is capable of keeping the load-oscillation angles small throughout the maneuvers while completing them in a relatively reasonable time.