Abstract
This paper considers the problem of controlling both the position and the attitude of a four-rotor mini helicopter. The four-rotor mini helicopter is described by a set of nonlinear equations and some parameters of the dynamics are subjected to uncertainies. This paper presents a new adaptive tracking controller based on backstepping technique using both a virtual attitude control and an on-line parameter estimation. This controller can make the tracking errors of the position and the yaw angle of a helicopter converge to zero exponentially. A numerical simulation is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.