Ship-Mounted Cranes Hoisting Underwater Payloads: Transportation Control With Guaranteed Constraints on Overshoots and Swing

In recent years, with the rapid development of marine engineering, ship-mounted crane control for transporting payloads in the water has attracted more attention. Compared with the case of transporting payloads above water, ship-mounted cranes with underwater payloads are more difficult to control. On the one hand, the underwater payload is directly affected by the hydrodynamic force, and the dynamics of ship-mounted cranes is much more complex, nonlinear, and coupled; on the other hand, the unactuated underwater payload swing is quite sensitive to external disturbances; thus, the harsh marine environment will bring great challenges to the antiswing control of underwater payloads. To address the above issues, this article puts forward a coupling characteristic indicator(CCI)-based nonlinear control method to realize accurate positioning and swing suppression for ship-mounted cranes hoisting payloads in the water, which not only simultaneously suppresses actuated boom overshoots and constrains unactuated payload swing, but also indicates whether the coupling terms are beneficial or harmful to make full use of them to improve transient control performance. Rigorous theoretical derivation proves the closed-loop stability. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution to handle state constraints and utilizing the coupling characteristics of ship-mounted cranes for transferring payloads in the water. Finally, the proposed controller is applied to a self-made hardware platform, and the experimental results show that the designed method achieves satisfactory control performance.