Curvilinear Transport of Suspended Payloads

Abstract

Automated transport of suspended objects is a subject of importance in many manufacturing, construction, and military applications. Suppression of the natural oscillation of payloads after a transport motion has been extensively studied, but generalized planar motion has yet to be examined. Obstacles in a crane or robot workspace may necessitate transport using a sequence of many linear segments or by a sequence of fewer curvilinear ones. The use of curvilinear motions in such cases may have the following advantages: (1) less error buildup in optimization due to the use of fewer segments, and (2) faster transport. We investigate parametrically-defined polynomial spatial paths optimized using dynamic programming. We present simulations and experimental evaluations of these optimizations.