Control Allocation for an Unmanned Hybrid Aerial Vehicle

This work presents a novel control allocation strategy for model tilt-rotor type VTOL aircraft. The aircraft considered has four tilting propellers and the aerodynamic actuators of an airplane. Control allocation converts the high-level commands in terms of total desired thrust and torques into commands distributed among the vehicle's eleven actuators. The proposed method independently tilts two pairs of propellers to generate torque along the thrust vector, which results in close-to-optimal solutions while being computationally efficient. This approach showed promising results both in simulation and tests on the vehicle and can be used in combination with any controller that generates a two-dimensional thrust and a three-dimensional torque vector.