Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By : Ty Audronis
Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By: Ty Audronis

Overview of this book

The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 1. Drones 101

Congratulations! You've taken the first step into the exciting world of designing and developing your very own purpose-built drone. Humankind has constantly been pushing the edges of their technology. Our technological progression is built into our DNA so thoroughly that we mark complete eras of our history with the technological state of the art. The Bronze Age, the Industrial Era, Space-Age, Information Age, and now the "Drone Era." It truly is exciting to live in the drone era. Well, we have a lot to cover, so let's get started:

We'll be covering the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introduction to drones
  • Purposes for drones
  • Types of drones
  • Ardupilot 101
  • Safety and best practices