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

Our rover


Meet the Traxxas Rustler VXL Brushless (following picture), an off-road speed demon at more than 70 mph with a 3S battery. If you're familiar with this car, you'll recognize that it is certainly not (completely) stock. Bigger, wider tires have been fitted with deeper treads for better traction and more resistance to rolling. Additionally, these tires are very soft (adding to the suspension of the vehicle) to reduce vibration on the chassis.

Finally, a wheelie bar has been added to keep it from flipping during acceleration and bumps.

You may also notice that we added a bumper to the front to protect the suspension against forward collisions. Let's get started.