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

Spawning a marketable deal


As any business major can tell you, the key to making money on a product is the law of supply and demand. The key here is demand. The best ideasthe ideas that changed the world and made the inventor a ton of capital—aren't necessarily the ideas that cater to a customer with an uber-budget. The wheel, the mouse trap, even the scrub-daddy are multimillion (even billion) dollar ideas that everyone can use, most can afford, and solve a basic problem.

Personally, I don't hunt, full disclosure. I've never been duck hunting. However, I have noticed that those I do know (who hunt) have duck decoys—lots of them. Different decoys for different types of ducks, and often they come back with fewer decoys than they left with.

Also, hunting is boring. Go out to an area and wait, and wait, and keep waiting until eventually some ducks show up. What if you could make the waiting process more fun? What if you could drive a duck around on the pond, or even let it drive itself and navigate...