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

Tuning a fixed wing aircraft with mission planner


By now, you're an expert at installing the right firmware and running through the initial set up within mission planner. So, we're not going to waste your time with all that nonsense at this point. Let's start with setting up the pitot tube.

Configuring the pitot tube

The first thing we have to do is tell Pixhawk to actually use the pitot tube, as well as what kind it is. The following screenshot shows the menu in mission planner, where you will activate the pitot tube we installed:

Realizing that it has already been stated, we wish to underscore the need for a pitot tube. Some builders claim that pitot tubes are not required for fixed wing aircraft. Although from a software/hardware standpoint, this is true; in reality, this philosophy couldn't be any more wrong. Using GPS alone only measures ground speed. Without measuring the actual airspeed of the aircraft, going downwind can result in stalls, and going into the wind could result in over...