Constrained actuator coordination by virtual state governing

The coordination of multiple constrained actuators is relevant to several practical systems, including those in automotive and aerospace applications. Often, the usage of a specific group of actuators is to be minimized either because of its operating cost or because of undesired side-effects. In some cases, controllers for each actuator are already available and rather than redesigning the whole control strategy, a coordination scheme can be introduced to regulate the interaction between the different actuator controllers and to enforce system-wide constraints. In this paper we propose a design for such a coordination strategy in the case where two sets of actuators are available, each with a pre-designed and non-modifiable state-feedback controller. The obtained control strategy is shown to recursively enforce constraints on the actuators and on the system state, to be asymptotically stable, and to use the set of expensive actuators only for finite time. An example of satellite attitude control is shown.