Spline-based input allocation on an overactuated tilting and twisting unmanned aerial vehicle

In this paper, we study the performance of a recently proposed approach for dynamic control allocation (DCA) for an overactuated quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with tilting and twisting propellers. In DCA, overactuation is exploited to modify a given closed-loop system so that the plant's output is left unchanged while the steady-state evolution of the control input is optimized with respect to a Lagrange cost. This research is built over an innovative DCA solution recently proposed by the authors, exploiting periodic piecewise polynomial signals. Interestingly, even though the dynamics of the mentioned UAV are highly non-linear, a suitable choice of DCA strategy allows to design of the allocation module simply by using tools developed for the Linear Time Invariant (LTI) case.