Minimum Power Incremental Control Allocation Using Real-Time Power Measurements

Abstract

This paper proposes a power-optimal incremental allocation scheme for over-actuated aircraft configurations. The proposed allocation scheme is built upon a baseline incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) controller. The algorithm consists of a two-stage allocation scheme. First, the incremental pseudo controls are allocated in a direction-preserving manner when actuator saturation occurs. Second, a global objective function is minimized that provides global power optimality for the aircraft, by utilizing a null space transition scheme. Existing methods either minimize only L1/L2 norm of the actuator command increments, or use a power consumption model to construct a secondary objective function for the allocation. In this paper, we propose a secondary objective function that is dependent on the real-time power consumption of the actuators. The method does not require an energy model for the actuators, which can be cumbersome to approximate accurately. Nonlinear simulation results with a transition aircraft demonstrate reduced power consumption in comparison to existing model-based approaches.