Methods for Compensating for Control Allocator and Actuator Interactions

In this work, a method, which post-processes the output of a control allocation algorithm, is developed to compensate for actuator dynamics. In reaching this objective, it is of great importance to consider the real-world applicability of the approach. In order to obtain an algorithm which can operate in real-time on a typical flight computer, it is pertinent to not add to the complexity of the constrained control allocation algorithm. Likewise, it is necessary to develop an approach that is applicable to both the saturated and unsaturated control effector cases. One method which can accomplish these goals is to post-process the output of the control allocation algorithm to overdrive the actuators so that at the end of a sampling interval, the actual actuator positions are equivalent to the desired actuator positions. This is the approach taken in this work and it yields a simple, but effective, means of compensating for actuator dynamics.