Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines

Problems in the motion control of aircraft are of perennial interest to the control engineer as they tend to be of complex and nonlinear nature.

Modelling and Control of Mini-Flying Machines is an exposition of models developed for various types of mini-aircraft:

• planar Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft;
• helicopters;
• quadrotor mini-rotorcraft;
• other fixed-wing aircraft;
• blimps;

for each of which 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.