Control Allocation Consensus among onboard Actuators with a Directed/Undirected Graph Topology

Abstract

Control allocation is required in many networked systems or systems with distributed actuating subsystems for the purpose of achieving hardware redundancy or increasing actuation efficiency. As the number of actuators increases, the computational cost also increases and the robustness with respect to real-time information sacrifices if a typical centralized, open-loop optimization method is used for control allocation. This study proposes a new consensus based distributed allocation scheme for actuators/jets onboard a conceptual small unmanned aerial system. Different from our previous research, the distributed actuators are connected via a directed/undirected graph. The proposed method is validated via simulation.