Over the last century, the scientific community has dealt with the control of flying machines by mainly developing different strategies in relation to different classes of aircraft, and no unified control approach has been developed so far. The present thesis contributes towards the development of a unified control approach for aerial vehicles by maintaining aerodynamic forces in the control design. It is assumed, however, that the aerodynamic effects of rotational and unsteady motions are negligible, and that the means of actuation for an aerial vehicle consist of a body-fixed thrust force for translational motion and a control torque for attitude monitoring. This thesis then focuses on the guidance loop of the control problem. One of the main objectives has been to determine how to regulate the thrust intensity and the vehicle orientation to compensate for the orientation-dependent external forces. In particular, the modeling, analysis, and control of the longitudinal aircraft dynamics is first addressed. Then, some of these studies are extended to three-dimensional motions of symmetric aircraft, such as missile-like bodies. An original outcome of this thesis is to state conditions on the aerodynamic force that allow the control problem to be recasted into that of controlling a spherical body. In this case, strong stability results can be shown. The proposed control laws incorporate integral and anti-wind up terms and do not rely on a switching policy between several control laws.
