Abstract: Abstract: A cable-driven hanging transport system has the characteristics of labor saving, economic efficiency and good revenue, along with good prospect for increasing orchard utilization. Compared with the wheeled carrier and crawler, it can meet the demand of the complex mountainous topography. Both during and after transfer, the load motion of the hanging system can cause load swings, which is undesirable especially in the variations of acceleration. The longitudinal oscillations may lead to the instability of system and damage of agricultural goods. The aim of this paper is to develop an effective control method for the load motion that produces short travel time with suppressed load swing and satisfies operational constraints. Due to the nonlinearities of spatial three-dimensional motion of transferred load, the dynamics of the cable-driven hanging transport system showed complexity with coupled motion of load. In fact, the lateral movement had little effect on the longitudinal stability due to the low transport speed of cable and lager curvature radius of rails, which could be ignored in the development of plant equations. In order to effectively suppress the longitudinal load swings, the Lagrange equations were utilized and a mathematical model of the transport system was proposed. The transport system with multiple load masses in series can be considered as similar to the hoist system with a single concentrated load. The reason is that the distances between each hook point and mass center of load are at roughly the same value. As a result, the dynamic model of the transport system can be simplified to a linearized model by ignoring the effect of lateral movement and assuming the multiple load masses in series to be a single load mass. The state-space form of longitudinal equations of load motion was developed and its controllability and observability was analyzed. The system transfer function was obtained. From the performance specifications, a compensated controller with root locus correction was proposed by reshaping the root locus in order that the dominant closed-loop poles can be at desired locations in the complex plane. The damping ratio and natural frequency were specified. The designed procedure of root locus correction was achieved by adjusting the compensator pole and zeros with the addition of two zeros, which make the pole on the positive real axis move into the left half complex plane by eliminating the remaining zero at the origin plane. Because all the roots have negative real parts after reshaping the root locus, the closed-loop transport system was stable. The simulation and experimental results confirmed that the designed system was acceptable. The damping time was considerably reduced as compared with the original system without root locus correction. The stability of the transport system was guaranteed by the proposed controller with root locus correction for all values of gain, which can suppress the longitudinal swing angle within ±1.5° and reduce the maximum magnitude of in-plane swing angular velocity to 10% of that of the original system. In terms of the transporting time and process stability, the proposed control method can offer significant improvement in the actual operations of a hanging transport system.