A piecewise linear control allocation approach for a flying wing aircraft

A piecewise linear control allocation approach is presented for the solution of the non-linear control allocation problem for a flying wing aircraft with redundant control effectors. The presented approach utilizes the piecewise linear assumption for the control effector moment data. This assumption allows the non-linear control allocation problem to be reduced to a piecewise linear program. In order to solve the piecewise linear program, it was re-formulated as a mixed-integer linear program. The approach was implemented in a nonlinear Simulink simulation of a flying wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The analysis of the simulation results shows that the piecewise linear program approach results in improved tracking performance compared with the traditional control allocation approach that uses a linear approximation of the control moments. The control moments modeling errors for the nonlinear control allocation approach are an order of magnitude better on average than those for the linear control allocation approach when the aircraft is subjected to control effector failures.