Constrained quadratic programming techniques for control allocation

The paper considers the objective of optimally specifying redundant control effectors under constraints, a problem commonly referred to as control allocation. The problem is posed as a mixed ℓ₂-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 a 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.