Improving Manual Control of Two-Link Pendulum on Gantry Crane With Anti-Delay Closed-Loop Input Shaping

Abstract

This paper presents a novel and improved technique in manual control of flexible systems. Flexible systems, when subject to a rapid movement commanded by a human operator, exhibit severe oscillation, causing low positioning accuracy, high fatigue to the human operator, and unsafe accidents. Input shaping filter was proposed to reduce this oscillation by using the destructive interference principle where impulse responses cancel one another resulting in zero residual vibration. Recently, the input shaping filter was placed inside the feedback loop, so-called closed-loop signal shaping, to assist with the manual control of the flexible systems. The vibration was successfully suppressed. However, the input shaping filter also introduced time delays in the feedback loop, which limit the performance of the human operator. This paper offers a breakthrough idea by introducing an anti-delay algorithm called Smith predictor inside the feedback loop. When the plant model is perfect, it can be shown that the Smith predictor can entirely remove the effect of time delay from the feedback loop; therefore, improving the performance of the human operator. Experiments on manual control of a two-link pendulum on a gantry crane show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The human operator was able to move the two-link pendulum with minimum residual vibration. Comparing to the currently world-best technique, the proposed technique could achieve faster maneuvering time, higher accuracy, and with less subjective difficulty.