Ship-mounted cranes are used to transfer cargo from large container ships to smaller lighters when deep-water ports are not available. The wave-induced motion of the crane ship produces large pendulations of hoisted cargo and causes operations to be suspended. In this work, we show that in boom type ship-mounted cranes, it is possible to reduce these pendulations significantly by controlling the slew and luff angles of the boom. Such a control can be achieved with the heavy equipment that is already part of the crane so that retrofitting existing cranes would require a small effort. Moreover, the control is superimposed on the commands of the operator transparently. The successful control strategy is based on delayed-position feedback of the cargo motion in-plane and out-of-plane of the boom and crane tower. Its effectiveness is demonstrated with a fully nonlinear three-dimensional computer simulation and with an experiment on a 1/24 scale model of a T-ACS (The Auxiliary Crane Ship) crane mounted on a platform moving with three degrees of freedom to simulate the ship roll, pitch, and heave motions of the crane ship. The results demonstrate that the pendulations can be significantly reduced, and therefore the range of sea conditions in which cargo-transfer operations could take place can be greatly expanded. Furthermore, the control strategy is applied experimentally to a scaled model of a tower crane. The effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated for both rotary and gantry modes of operation of the crane. This work was supported by the Office of Naval Research under Contract #N00014-96-1-1123. / Ph. D.

It is sometimes necessary to transfer cargo from a large ship to a smaller ship at sea. Specially designed craneships are used for this task, however the wave-induced motions of the ship can cause large pendulations of cargo being hoisted by a ship-mounted crane. This makes cargo transfer in rough seas extremely dangerous and therefore transfer operations normally cease when sea state 3 is reached. If the cargo pendulations could be reduced in higher sea states, transfer operations would be possible. By controlling the boom luff angle, one can reduce the cargo pendulations in the plane of the boom significantly. A two-dimensional pendulum with a rigid massless cable and massive point load is used to model the system. A control law using time-delayed position feedback is developed and the system is simulated on a computer using the full nonlinear equations of motion. A three-degree-of-freedom ship-motion simulation platform, capable of simulating heave, pitch, and roll motions, was built. The computer simulation results were experimentally verified by mounting a 1/24th scale model of a T-ACS crane on the ship-motion simulation platform. / Master of Science

The main objective of this work is to design robust, fast, and practical controllers for gantry and tower cranes. The controllers are designed to transfer the load from point to point as fast as possible and, at the same time, the load swing is kept small during the transfer process and completely vanishes at the load destination. Moreover, variations of the system parameters, such as the cable length and the load weight, are also included. Practical considerations, such as the control action power, and the maximum acceleration and velocity, are taken into account. In addition, friction effects are included in the design using a friction-compensation technique. The designed controllers are based on two approaches. In the first approach, a gain-scheduling feedback controller is designed to move the load from point to point within one oscillation cycle without inducing large swings. The settling time of the system is taken to be equal to the period of oscillation of the load. This criterion enables calculation of the controller feedback gains for varying load weight and cable length. The position references for this controller are step functions. Moreover, the position and swing controllers are treated in a unified way. In the second approach, the transfer process and the swing control are separated in the controller design. This approach requires designing two controllers independently: an anti-swing controller and a tracking controller. The objective of the anti-swing controller is to reduce the load swing. The tracking controller is responsible for making the trolley follow a reference position trajectory. We use a PD-controller for tracking, while the anti-swing controller is designed using three different methods: (a) a classical PD controller, (b) two controllers based on a delayed-feedback technique, and (c) a fuzzy logic controller that maps the delayed-feedback controller performance. To validate the designed controllers, an experimental setup was built. Although the designed controllers work perfectly in the computer simulations, the experimental results are unacceptable due to the high friction in the system. This friction deteriorates the system response by introducing time delay, high steady-state error in the trolley and tower positions, and high residual load swings. To overcome friction in the tower-crane model, we estimate the friction, then we apply an opposite control action to cancel it. To estimate the friction force, we assume a mathematical model and estimate the model coefficients using an off-line identification technique using the method of least squares. With friction compensation, the experimental results are in good agreement with the computer simulations. The gain-scheduling controllers transfer the load smoothly without inducing an overshoot in the trolley position. Moreover, the load can be transferred in a time near to the optimal time with small swing angles during the transfer process. With full-state feedback, the crane can reach any position in the working environment without exceeding the system power capability by controlling the forward gain in the feedback loop. For large distances, we have to decrease this gain, which in turn slows the transfer process. Therefore, this approach is more suitable for short distances. The tracking-anti-swing control approach is usually associated with overshoots in the translational and rotational motions. These overshoots increase with an increase in the maximum acceleration of the trajectories . The transfer time is longer than that obtained with the first approach. However, the crane can follow any trajectory, which makes the controller cope with obstacles in the working environment. Also, we do not need to recalculate the feedback gains for each transfer distance as in the gain-scheduling feedback controller. / Ph. D.

Diplomová práce pojednává o teorii chaotických dynamických systémů, speciálně se pak zabývá Rösslerovým systémem. Kromě standardních výpočtů spojených s bifurkační analýzou se práce zaměřuje na problém stabilizace, konkrétně na stabilizaci rovnovážných bodů. Ke stabilizaci je využita základní metoda zpětnovazebního řízení s časovým zpožděním. Významnou část práce tvoří zavedení a implementace obecné metody pro hledání vhodné volby parametrů vedoucí k úspěšné stabiliaci. Dalším diskutovaným tématem je možnost synchronizace dvou Rösslerových systémů pomocí různých synchronizačních schémat.

We study the thermodynamic properties induced by non-reciprocal interactions between stochastic degrees of freedom in time- and space-continuous systems. We show that, under fairly general conditions, non-reciprocal coupling alone implies a steady energy flow through the system, i.e., non-equilibrium. Projecting out the non-reciprocally coupled degrees of freedom renders non-Markovian, one-variable Langevin descriptions with complex types of memory, for which we find a generalized second law involving information flow.We demonstrate that non-reciprocal linear interactions can be used to engineer non-monotonic memory, which is typical for, e.g., time-delayed feedback control, and is automatically accompanied with a nonzero information flow through the system. Furthermore, already a single non-reciprocally coupled degree of freedom can extract energy from a single heat bath (at isothermal conditions), and can thus be viewed as a minimal version of a time-continuous, autonomous ‘Maxwell demon’.We also show that for appropriate parameter settings, the non-reciprocal system has characteristic features of active matter, such as a positive energy input on the level of the fluctuating trajectories without global particle transport.