Development of the Autonomous Overhead Travelling Crane with Real Time Path-Planning Based on Obstacle Information

The purpose of this paper is to present a method to establish an autonomous mobile crane system which includes on-line obstacle recognition, path planning by on-line and suppression of sway of the transferred object. It is especially necessary for the online path planning occurring during transferring to be carried out relatively quickly. This paper describes a method of path planning that can be carried out in a short time with an easy algorithm. This target system has three different parts: a visual system, a planning system, and a control system. In the visual system, ultrasonic sensors are used to renovate a partial environmental map during transferring with the quick scanning time. In the planning system, a proposed online path-planning method based on the expanded path-planning method of Srinivas allows for changes such as a change in the transportation environment to be made during the transferring. Online path planning has been achieved using information regarding obstacles around the object being manipulated, as obtained by ultrasonic sensor. Finally, we have confirmed the usefulness of the proposed method by transfer experiment based on simulation.