Development of Trajectory Generator Program for Path Planning of Industrial Overhead Cranes

Abstract

According to the complex dynamic of an overhead crane, developing a payload path planning is a labored task for inexperienced operators. This paper shows the developing tool for 3D payload path planning of industrial overhead cranes dominated by speed control mode. The velocity trajectory generator program based on user interface (UI) was developed using the App Designer in MATLAB. The trajectories are based on the cubic polynomial trajectory and the adaptive command smoother. The cubic polynomial trajectory is used for generating the smoothed path of each waypoint while the payload sway suppression is handled by the smoother. By this concept, the crane moves through the sequentially given waypoints according to given waypoint constraints such as velocity and time. In the program, the user must define the desired waypoint coordinates while the velocity points and time points can be automatically obtained by the program. Furthermore, the program can visualize the workspace and the payload path prediction in 2D and 3D as well as the plot of velocity trajectories in the three axes. The travelling path information is also provided to evaluate the desired path before the velocity trajectories are exported.