The aim of this thesis is to develop a model for flight simulation of a radio controlled aerobatic helicopter, available in the Industrial and Civil Department of the University of Pisa. The purpose of the project is to make the small scale helicopter capable to complete a planned mission in autonomous flight, with automatic take-off and landing and sense and avoid capabilities. In the first part of this work, a non-linear open-loop analytic model of the rotor-craft is developed, with the discussion of hypothesis and possible simplifications. The second part focuses on the identification of the helicopter model parameters, based on a trust region reflective algorithm, in order to evaluate the inertial, aerodynamic and elastic variables introduced in the foregoing section. The accuracy of the developed model is verified by the comparison between responses from the model and flight measurements. In the last part, a simplified model is evaluated in order to define the transfer functions needed for the synthesis of autopilot control laws
