Computationally efficient control allocation

Publication Date
2001-08-21Filing Date
2000-08-10Inventor
Durham, Wayne
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
A computationally efficient method for calculating near-optimal solutions to the three-objective, linear control allocation problem is disclosed. The control allocation problem is that of distributing the effort of redundant control effectors to achieve some desired set of objectives. The problem is deemed linear if control effectiveness is affine with respect to the individual control effectors. The optimal solution is that which exploits the collective maximum capability of the effectors within their individual physical limits. Computational efficiency is measured by the number of floating-point operations required for solution. The method presented returned optimal solutions in more than 90% of the cases examined; non-optimal solutions returned by the method were typically much less than 1% different from optimal and the errors tended to become smaller than 0.01% as the number of controls was increased. The magnitude of the errors returned by the present method was much smaller than those that resulted from either pseudo inverse or cascaded generalized inverse solutions. The computational complexity of the method presented varied linearly with increasing numbers of controls; the number of required floating point operations increased from 5.5 i, to seven times faster than did the minimum-norm solution (the pseudoinverse), and at about the same rate as did the cascaded generalized inverse solution. The computational requirements of the method presented were much better than that of previously described facet-searching methods which increase in proportion to the square of the number of controls.
Assignee
Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties, Inc.
Patent Number
6278908
Application Number
9635684
Primary/U.S. Class
318/567
Other/U.S. Class
318/568.11
318/568.2
342/90
342/96
700/262
700/1
700/245
700/251
700/252
701/23
901/30
CPC Class
G05B13/02
G05B2219/39258
Patent Type
utility
Collections
- Virginia Tech Patents [620]