Design and experimental validation of a nonlinear control law for a ducted-fan miniature aerial vehicle

In this paper, an experimental activity carried out at the University of Bologna regarding the development of a ducted-fan miniature aerial vehicle (MAV) is presented. The ducted-fan aerial configuration is potentially interesting in a wide range of applications including, among others, mobile surveillance, video capture, environmental monitoring, relief map survey, etc. In particular, the paper focuses on the design of the nonlinear control law which allows the dynamics of the aircraft to robustly track arbitrary lateral, longitudinal, vertical and heading references, and on the experimental validation obtained by developing a small scale prototype.