Link Adjustment for Assembly Deviation Control of Extendible Support Structures via Sparse Optimization

The assembly accuracy of the extendible support structure is of importance for the imaging capability of synthetic aperture radar antennas. In general, due to manufacturing imperfections and installation variations, its assembly accuracy will be inevitably degraded. Therefore, controlling the assembly deviation is highly concerned in practice. To meet the accuracy requirement and make 'the control' more efficient, this study proposes a novel method to quantitatively conduct dimensional adjustment of links for extendible support structures of synthetic aperture radar antennas. Since the extendible support structure is generally over-constrained in the deployed configuration, the relationship between the assembly deviation and the variation sources is first derived by means of equivalent transformation. Based on the mathematical expression of assembly deviation, an inequality constrained sparse optimization model for quantitatively resizing links is formulated. Then, an efficient algorithm integrating the alternating direction method of multipliers and binary search is developed to solve the above optimization model, thereby acquiring the optimal combination of link adjustment. Finally, numerical case studies are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in Matlab, which show that it can not only achieve satisfactory performance in prediction but also significantly improve the assembly efficiency.