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

The tuning process


Every airframe is different. Sometimes even the same model airframe can have different settings from one airplane to the next. So, it's important to know that any settings you see for PIDs are not the settings you should use for your plane. Rather, this section is about the process of how to arrive at those PID settings. The first step is to make sure your airplane flies right with no Pixhawk input whatsoever.

Your maiden flight

Maidening an aircraft just means taking it into the air for the first time. The big difference between maidening a Pixhawk airplane and any other RC aircraft is that you should never use the trim controls on your radio.

Trim controls on the radio are small buttons or sliders near the sticks that allow a user to adjust the control surfaces in real time for straight flight by offsetting the value (PWMs) of the sticks. The problem is that by offsetting the values of the sticks by using trim controls, the Pixhawk will not know when the sticks are centered...