ICSC18 was the seventh edition of the International Conference on Systems and Control, technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Control Systems Society. It has been held at the Universitat Politècnica de Valencia, Spain. About 100 participants had the opportunity to share together the latest developments and new trends in systems and control. Both theoretical and applied papers were presented.
Marco Giacomelli, from I-MECH partner University of Brescia, presented the paper “MPC-PID Control of Operator-In-The-Loop Overhead Cranes: A Practical Approach” (authors: M. Giacomelli, M. Faroni, D. Gorni, A. Marini, L. Simoni, A. Visioli). In this paper, a velocity control system for industrial overhead cranes based on a Model Predictive Control approach is proposed. The problem of the control of the operator-in-the-loop system is addressed, as the operator drives the system pushing a button while the control algorithm drives the cart reducing the oscillations of the load. An inner velocity control loop is used in order to overcome some of the problems of controlling the system by using directly the torque of the motor as a control variable. Simulations show the effectiveness of the approach, in particular in the presence of friction.