A spherical pendulum model was used to predict the motion of the swinging trolley in Tracking swinging conveyor trolleys and to describe the dynamics of the crane load in Crane Control.

Spherical Pendulum

View spherical pendulum demonstration code using the online IPython notebook viewer http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/www.torsteinmyhre.name/snippets/spherical_pendulum/spherical_pendulum.ipynb

A second IPython notebook develops the equations of motion for a spherical pendulum with a moving pivot point http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/url/www.torsteinmyhre.name/snippets/spherical_pendulum/spherical_pendulum_with_moving_pivot_point.ipynb