Project
Modern Control Design Project
Fall 2025 • School Project
Designed and verified a discrete-time control system for a nonlinear gantry crane to govern safe, stable payload transport without oscillatory instability.
MATLABSimulink
Details
- Identified a nonlinear gantry-crane plant, linearized it with small-angle approximations, and designed a direct z-domain controller at 50 Hz that achieved 0% overshoot and a short settling time for a 1 m move while enforcing a maximum cart velocity of 1 m/s.
- Validated robustness with frequency-domain analysis: measured 48 deg phase margin at crossover and estimated delay tolerance of about 0.5 s before marginal instability.
- Extended the design in state space using LQR plus a full-order observer, then compared reference-scaling and integral-error augmentation controllers that delivered approximately 3.45-3.95 s settling, 0-9% overshoot, and negligible steady-state error under actuator saturation with anti-windup compensation.