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

Summary


In a book about Pixhawk drones, you may be asking, "Where's the programming of the Pixhawk?!" We'd be remiss in a book about designing purpose-built drones if we didn't cover something on the water. Plus, we want to show you that there are similarities between land and water drones. What we really wanted to get deeper into is the design and prototyping of an idea. Now that we've covered the modeling, and construction of your own design (we covered modeling, printing, water-sealing, design, sketching, identifying problems, and construction testing); in the next chapter, we're going to get much deeper into the Pixhawk.

We'll be taking a (pretty much) fully constructed vehicle (a motorized golf trolly), and adapting it for Pixhawk. We'll also be getting into using a mobile device (via Bluetooth) to control your drone, as well as getting deeper into the configuration of Pixhawk.

From here in, now that you're an expert in turning your construction designs into reality we're going to be...