A new control allocation method that accounts for effector dynamics

Abstract

Given a time history of desired moments, the control allocation problem is to solve for the effector inputs so that some norm of the error between the achieved and desired moments is minimized. Existing methods solve for the actuator deflections, while accounting for magnitude and rate limitations of the effectors. In this paper, we propose the dynamic control allocation (DCA) Method, that also accounts for effector dynamics, in addition to magnitude and rate limits. We show through numerical experiments that the DCA method allocates the desired moments according to effector bandwidths - that is the slow effectors are allocated the lower frequencies in the desired moments. The numerical simulations also show that the DCA outperforms the existing simplex algorithm based LP method, that does not account for actuator dynamics.