Energy-Efficient Incremental Control Allocation for Transition Flight via Quadratic Programming

The transition flight of VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft is generally energy-consuming. This paper proposes an energy-efficient incremental control allocation method for transition flight control. To minimize energy consumption in the time increment, a secondary objective is incorporated into the total cost function when implementing control allocation. This energy increment is equated to the power increment and is estimated using its sensitivities to all control inputs. The final control allocation problem comes in the form of quadratic programming and is efficiently solved by a warm-start active set algorithm. This energy-efficient allocation is embedded in the INDI controller to control the trajectory of a VTOL model. Its performance is compared to open-loop optimal control results and the performance achieved with the weighted least square (WLS) and the redistributed pseudoinverse (RPI) methods. Results show that the INDI controller with the energy-efficient control allocation effectively reduces energy consumption while maintaining accurate trajectory tracking.