Fault‐tolerant controller design for tower cranes considering distributed payload beams

Summary Due to the long‐term operation of the tower crane, various faults will inevitably occur, such as actuator faults, which further increases the difficulty of controller design. In this paper, a fault‐tolerant control method with adaptive gain is proposed for the double‐pendulum tower crane with distributed payload beam (DTCDPB) system in the existence of external disturbances and actuator failures. First, a nonlinear fault‐tolerant observer is designed for fault diagnosis. Second, an S‐shaped trajectory functions are coupled online and embedded into the system target trajectories for payload swing suppression. Then, feedforward compensation is applied in the controller for the observed faults. Moreover, the adaptive suppression term to be activated is also designed in the controller taking into account the errors existing in the observation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed observer and controller is experimentally verified.