Construction and Control of an Educational Lab Process - The Gantry Crane

In English In this paper, we describe the construction and control of a gantry crane that is used in courses at the Department of Automatic Control, Lund university. Two different models of the crane are developed. A thorough example of path following, including on-line time-varying input/state-transformations and LQG control, used in a laboratory exercise is shown together with experimental results. Time-optimal trajectories for position control, with constraints on positions, load angles, and control signals are computed using Modelica and Optimica.