Robotic tower cranes with hardware-in-the-loop: Enhancing construction safety and efficiency

Abstract

This paper presents a full suite of Robotic Tower Crane (RTC) technologies that can be seamlessly implemented on traditional saddle-jib tower cranes to boost the construction safety and productivity. The robotisation of tower cranes enables the RTC capabilities of automatic path planning for point-to-point movement, and dynamic obstacle avoidance with re-planning. While the former fast generates the RTC path based on decoupling of vertical and horizontal movements, the latter takes a ‘hoist-first’ approach to prioritise safety. A motion compensation algorithm is developed for multi-step speed control to achieve the exact displacement based on dynamically optimizing the time duration at each planned velocity. The implementation of the RTC system has demonstrated a comprehensive approach that combines laboratory simulations, hardware-in-the-loop testing, and live demos for on-site deployment. A comparative performance and operational time study reveals the RTC's superior precision and consistency over human operators.