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

Transitioning from VTOL to airplane


Transitioning is simple once everything is tuned. All you have to do is change modes (such as going from QLOITER to FBWA). It will happen automatically. Again, avoid MANUAL. This will instantly cut the multicopter motors and your aircraft will drop like a rock until you manage to regain control and lift up (much like a stall).

This is what will happen when you switch to FBWA or STABILIZE from a Q mode (such as QLOITER):

  1. The aircraft will attempt to maintain altitude using the quad motors and engage the airplane's tractor motor to provide thrust at user-inputted throttle.
  2. Quad motors will continue to provide lift and stability until ARSPD_FBW_MIN airspeed is reached and if there is no pitot tube, this is based on GPS estimate.
  3. Q_TRANSITION_MS will engage and shut down the quad motors over the specified time.

The transition back to multicopter mode works similarly, but has a few differences:

  1. Airplane tractor motor will immediately stop.
  2. Controls switch to multicopter...