Jerk-Based Control Allocation for Aerial Vehicles With Tilting Rotors

Abstract This article presents a jerk-based control allocation framework, particularly well suited for tiltrotor vehicles, enabling the consideration of actuator rate saturations and bandwidths. It is shown how a jerk-based allocation reformulates the otherwise nonlinear allocation problem encountered with tilt rotors into a linear one, and how the allocation task can be solved efficiently exploiting symbolic calculations and Cholesky-based matrix decomposition. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in simulations for a quad-tilt rotor configuration of an airship drone and contrasted to a proposed simplified, purely symbolic allocation strategy.