A smooth control allocation method for a distributed electric propulsion VTOL aircraft test platform

Distributed electronic propulsion (DEP) aircraft with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) ability mostly equipped multiple redundant tiltable propulsors, which are used to provide not only thrusts, but also control torque in all flight mode. The features make the allocation problem of these both complex important. Therefore, this paper proposes: (?) a prototype platform for DEP VTOL that allows researchers design analyse strategies, (??) uniform hierarchical method can be adapted MC FW modes. contains ten fully actuated thrusters, distributed scaled geometry typical DEP-VTOL aircraft. proposed strategy uses structure avoid high-dimensional matrix operations actuators. additional constraints on thrust tilt angles actuators addressed by adopting cascade generalized inversion (CGI) force decompensation (FD)-based methods coordinate transformation. A novel smooth through Schur Complement is presented achieve steady transition from Finally, implemented authors’ simulations experiments demonstrate its effectiveness smoothness.