Grav,
The American Helicopter Society has an annual forum where the various designers strut their stuff, with excellent technical papers and experimental work.
I suggest that you go to your nearest tech library resource and search the Forum publications for the last 15 years or so. The standard texts have a bit on this stuff (Prouty, Padfield) but I don't know that they peel too far back into the details.
The rotor characteristics are part of the "plant model" that is in the model following system, that is, the REAL behavior is cataloged by extensive simulator and flight test ("system identification" in the parlance of the controls engineer). When the model following system crunches out what the controls must do to make the machine obey the pilots request, it must subtract everything that the "plant" does that is wrong, so an accurate understanding of all the characteristics of the helo, main rotor, tail rotor, tail surfaces, engine characteristics are all part of the plant model. With this type of feed forward, the controls don't wait for a wrong motion to occur, they stomp out the improper response before it starts. We do the same thing daily, when we learn to adjust windage on a shot, or when we put a little more on the ball to account for some variable.
wikipedia has a nice set of write-ups, I might add this stuff to them. Note that controls are controls, thermostats have a lot in common with autopilots! I often use thermostats are a way to discuss how feedback controls work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_predictive_control
Here is a web page by Joe Horn, who is a good controls designer (we worked together a bit on Comanche). He describes a model following control system, but unfortunately, he is a bit too advanced for where this discussion is. You will find most of the papers in the AHS data base similarly esoteric!
http://www.personal.psu.edu/faculty/j/f/jfh19/dmc.html
Here is the whole paper:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/dob104/papers/mfcdmc.pdf
and another. Fig 5 is a bit better for our purposes, the boxes to the right of the "ideal" (which is the model that the controls try to follow) are the subtractive plant model elements:
http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/d/...airwakemfc.pdf