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

Why this particular airplane kit?


The plane we're using (as shown in the following image) is a Bixler from Hobby King. It's actually named after one of the two Joshes (Josh Bixler) from the popular YouTube channel Flite Test:

As you can see, it's very inexpensive. Well under $100, and comes with a motor, and all the servos necessary to fly it. The dihedral curve in the wing makes it uniquely stable for soaring. It also comes with the two halves of the main fuselage separated (making wire routing and component placement very easy). Finally, it's a powered glider. This means it's very efficient, and has the potential to travel great distances under minimal power. This is exactly what we're looking for!