Control allocation for over-actuated systems

Much emphasis has been placed on over-actuated systems for air vehicles. Over-actuating an air vehicle provides a certain amount of redundancy for the flight control system, thus potentially allowing for recovery from off-nominal conditions. Due to this redundancy, control allocation algorithms are typically utilized to compute a unique solution to the over-actuated problem. Control allocators compute the commands that are applied to the actuators so that a certain set of forces or moments are generated by the control effectors. Usually, control allocation problems are formulated as optimization problems so that all of the available degrees of freedom can be utilized and, when sufficient control power exists, secondary objectives can be achieved. In this work, a survey of control allocation techniques will be given.