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

Testing and driving


Before we take it out to the field, we'll want to test the connections. Close the Mission Planner software, remove the USB cable, and attach the USB telemetry dongle to your computer. With the wheels off the ground, power on your transmitter and rover by plugging the battery in, but do not arm the rover.

After starting the Mission Planner software, you may be asked again to find the rover's com port. In your device manager, the telemetry unit should be visible under the Ports tab, this time as a Silicon Labs device.

Upon successfully finding the telemetry dongle, you'll see this screen inside Mission Planner:

After clicking on the Connect button (top right of the interface), you should see your rover at your location. Yep... that's my house.

Let's do some initial tuning and show you how it's done. Before we actually drive the rover, we need to make sure it's not just going to speed away at 70+ mph into oblivion.

At this point, with the telemetry module communicating with the...