从机械结构及工作原理的角度看，可将塔式起重机视为一类涉及旋转、平移运动的特殊欠驱动机器人。塔式起重机载重量大，工作空间广，在建筑业等领域发挥着重要作用。然而，塔式起重机的动力学特性非常复杂，状态耦合性很强，给其负载消摆、定位控制研究带来了诸多挑战。目前，其控制研究仍处于初期阶段，许多实际问题亟待解决，如最优轨迹规划、不确定参数/干扰、输出反馈、吊绳柔性等。因此，塔式起重机的自动控制研究具有理论与实际的双重重要价值。针对上述挑战，结合实际应用中的迫切需求，本项目拟开展如下几个方面的研究工作：考虑状态约束的时间/能量最优轨迹规划、自适应/鲁棒轨迹跟踪控制、“人-起重机”协作控制、考虑吊绳柔性的非线性消摆定位控制，旨在提高塔式起重机系统的性能；基于此，将提出行之有效的关键控制技术，进行充分的理论分析，并在样机平台上完成实验验证。这些研究对于提高塔式起重机的工作效率与安全性而言，具有重要的价值。

From the viewpoint of mechanical structures and working principles, tower cranes can be regarded as a special class of underactuated robots involving rotational and translational movements. Due to the merits of large capacities and working space, tower cranes have been playing important roles in many fields, e.g., construction. However, tower cranes exhibit very complicated dynamic characteristics and strong state coupling, which bring many challenges for swing elimination and positioning control of payloads. Currently, the researches for tower crane control are still in the early stage, and many practical problems remain unresolved, e.g., optimal trajectory planning, uncertain parameters/disturbances, output feedback, rope flexibility, etc. Hence, researches on automatic control for tower cranes are both theoretically and practically important. For the above-mentioned challenges, motivated by the urgent demands in practical applications, the following researches will be carried out in this project to improve the performance of tower cranes: state-constrained time/energy-optimal trajectory planning, adaptive/robust tracking control, “human-crane” cooperative control, and nonlinear antiswing positioning control in the presence of rope flexibility. Some effective key control methods will be presented, for which in-depth theoretical analysis will be provided. After that, hardware experiments will be implemented to examine their performance. The researches in this project are important for improving the working efficiency and safety of tower crane systems.