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 this chapter, we learned how to implement skid-steering, using a rangefinder for obstacle avoidance, and how to make a rover follow us using Bluetooth and an Android phone app. As you can see (on some) applications with Pixhawk can be far easier than they seem at first. You can pilot your rover with your phone and even use a map to lay out a course (using waypoints) for the rover to automatically drive itself. But, most importantly, your new rover will follow your phone as if it were on a leash.

Now, we'll move on to some more advanced applications for Pixhawk aircraft. Brace yourself, this is where designing, fabricating, and implementing Pixhawk gets a lot more complex. But it's also where Pixhawk really shines, and is a whole lot of fun!