Kimon P. Valavanis 
Advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [PDF ebook] 
State of the Art and the Road to Autonomy

Background Information.- A Historical Perspective on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Modeling and Control Fundamentals.- Airplane Basic Equations of Motion and Open-Loop Dynamics.- Control Fundamentals of Small / Miniature Helicopters – A Survey.- A Tutorial Approach to Small Unmanned Helicopter Controller Design for Non-aggressive Flights.- Design and Control of a Miniature Quadrotor.- Navigation Aspects.- Obstacle and Terrain Avoidance for Miniature Aerial Vehicles.- Vision Based Navigation and Target Tracking for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.- Single and Multi-UAV Relative Position Estimation Based on Natural Landmarks.- Evolutionary Algorithm Based Path Planning for Multiple UAV Cooperation.- Applications.- Robust Nonlinear Observers for Attitude Estimation of Mini UAVs.- Autonomous Solar UAV for Sustainable Flights.- The Integration of a Multimodal MAV and Biomimetic Sensing for Autonomous Flights in Near-Earth Environments.- Dynamic Localization of Air-Ground Wireless Sensor Networks.- Decentralized Formation Tracking of Multi-Vehicle Systems with Consensus-Based Controllers.- “Hardware in the Loop” Tuning for a Volcanic Gas Sampling UAV.- A Modular On-board Processing System for Small Unmanned Vehicles.- Epilogue.- Conclusions and the Road Ahead.