Constrained quadratic programming techniques for control allocation

• Published in: 42nd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37475) Vol. 4; pp. 3378 - 3383 vol.4
• Main Authors: Petersen, J.A.M., Bodson, M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Actuators; Aerospace control; Aircraft; Control systems; Missiles; Modems; Navigation; Optimal control; Quadratic programming; Size control
• ISBN: 9780780379244; 0780379241
• ISSN: 0191-2216
• DOI: 10.1109/CDC.2003.1271666

The paper considers the objective of optimally specifying redundant actuators under constraints, a problem commonly referred to as control allocation. The problem is posed as a mixed /spl lscr//sub 2/-norm optimization objective and converted to a quadratic programming formulation. The implementation of an interior-point algorithm is presented. Alternative methods including fixed-point and active set methods are used to evaluate the reliability, accuracy and efficiency of the primal-dual interior-point method. While the computational load of the interior-point method is found to be greater for problems of small size, convergence to the optimal solution is also more uniform and predictable. In addition, the properties of the algorithm scale favorably with problem size.