This paper proposes, through a survey of models of several UAV-structures, a generic nonlinear model for reduced scale aerial robotic vehicles (6 DOF). Dynamics of an aircraft and some VTOL UAV (quadricopter, ducted fan and classical helicopter) are illustrated. This generic model focuses only on the key physical efforts acting on the dynamics in order to be sufficiently simple to design a controller. The small body forces expression which can introduce a zero dynamics is then discussed.

This paper presents a coupled observer that uses accelerometer, gyrometer and vision sensors to provide estimates of pose and linear velocity for an aerial robotic vehicle. The observer is based on a non-linear complimentary filter framework and incorporates adaptive estimates of measurement bias in gyrometers and accelerometers commonly encountered in low-cost inertial measurement systems. Asymptotic stability of the observer estimates is proved as well as bounded energy of the observer error signals. Experimental data is provided for the proposed filter run on data obtained from an experiment involving a remotely controlled helicopter.