Sliding Mode Control With Time Delay Estimator for Boom Cranes Considering Distributed Mass Payloads

Boom cranes play a significant role in various industries due to their extensive working space and high lifting capacity. Nevertheless, double-pendulum effects arise in boom cranes during heavy-load handling when the hook mass is significant. Under such conditions, the system exhibits increasingly complex dynamics, which complicates the controller design process. At present, most existing double pendulum models treat both the hook and the payload as point masses, which is no longer valid for distributed payloads and thus neglects their swing characteristics. Accordingly, this paper proposes a sliding mode control strategy combined with time-delay estimator, based on the dynamic double pendulum model of distributed payloads. The proposed method enhances robustness, achieves positioning objectives, and effectively suppressing the swing of the hook and the payload. Specifically, the system model is transformed to separate the uncertain terms. Then, the sliding surface is used to ensure that the system states converge within a finite time. Meanwhile, a time delay estimator is introduced to estimate the uncertain dynamics of the system. Finally, simulation tests are conducted through MATLAB/Simulink to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.