Virtual Mass Tuning of Overhead Cranes

This paper introduces a novel control paradigm for improving the performance of existing control laws for overhead cranes. The proposed approach functionally replaces the suspended mass of the physical system with a suitably tuned virtual mass. The motivating principle behind this control paradigm is that the performance of many energy-based control laws for overhead cranes strongly depends on the mass of the suspended load. Using a simple tuning procedure to optimize the virtual mass, it is shown that the proposed approach can significantly boost the performance of energy-based control laws while preserving the underlying stability guarantees.