  A Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft is capable of short/vertical
takeoffs and landings, thus eliminating the requirement of long runways. This
feature makes them suitable for a broader variety of missions, generally not
achievable by a traditional aircraft. The dynamics of the VTOL aircraft in the
vertical plane has been used as a benchmark problem to demonstrate the
effectiveness of different nonlinear control techniques, mainly due to being
highly coupled and non-minimum phase. This paper presents the design of an
inverse optimal control for a simplified VTOL aircraft model. The proposed
control law is based on a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF) which exploits the
normal form typically used for control design through feedback linearization.
The suggested control law is compared with dynamic feedback linearization based
control law and a comparison is drawn based on their efficacy and robustness.
