Development of an Efficient Control Allocation for Distributed Tiltrotor UAV

This work introduces an efficient control allocation method that improves the control performance of distributed tiltrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with redundant actuators. While the pseudo-inverse allocation method is popular for providing a robust least-squares solution and ease of implementation, it fails to consider input constraints and does not utilize all actuators efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based control allocation method founded on null space to ensure the entire attainable moment set is achievable. Additionally, we develop a prioritization-based projection algorithm to prevent input saturation. The proposed efficient control allocation, along with the pseudo-inverse allocation, are designed for distributed tiltrotor UAV. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.