A detailed comparison of control allocation techniques on a realistic on-ground aircraft benchmark

To achieve a high performance level during ground operations, the lateral dynamics of an aircraft must be controlled using all available actuators (rudder, nose wheel steering system and brakes), which gives rise to a challenging allocation problem. This provides an excellent benchmark to compare various kinds of control allocation techniques. In this paper, an exhaustive literature review is first presented. The most relevant allocation methods are then applied to an on-ground aircraft model, which has been previously validated against a high-fidelity Airbus simulator [1]. An extensive evaluation is finally performed based on a set of performance indicators such as the number of iterations, the convergence time, the error and the actuators consumption.