A Survey of Control Allocation Methods for Ships and Underwater Vehicles

Control allocation problems for marine vessels can be formulated as optimization problems, where the objective typically is to minimize the use of control effort (or power) subject to actuator rate and position constraints, power constraints as well as other operational constraints. In addition, singularity avoidance for vessels with azimuthing thrusters represent a challenging problem since a non-convex nonlinear program must be solved. This is useful to avoid temporarily loss of controllability in some cases. In this paper, a survey of control allocation methods for overactuated vessels are presented