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.