About this Book

Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines is an exposition of models developed to assist in the motion control of various types of mini-aircraft:

• Planar Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft;

• helicopters;

• quadrotor mini-rotorcraft;

• other fixed-wing aircraft;

• blimps.

For each of these it propounds:

• detailed models derived from Euler-Lagrange methods;

• appropriate nonlinear control strategies and convergence properties;

• real-time experimental comparisons of the performance of control algorithms;

• review of the principal sensors, on-board electronics, real-time architecture and communications systems for mini-flying machine control, including discussion of their performance;

• detailed explanation of the use of the Kalman filter to flying machine localization.

To researchers and students in nonlinear control and its applications Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines provides valuable insights to the application of real-time nonlinear techniques in an always challenging area.