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

The types of VTOL


There are essentially two types of VTOL: hybrid and vectored. All other VTOLs are a variation of the two. One is far easier to build, and one flies much better (and more efficiently). Unfortunately though, these are not the qualities of the same type of VTOL.

The hybrid VTOL

This is certainly easy to design and build. It's just a matter of taking a very good airplane and attaching a multirotor frame to it (centred around the CG of the airplane). That's a bit of an oversimplification, but accurate. Unfortunately, with this type of design the multicopter propellers themselves can begin spinning during forward flight due to the wind. And even with no spinning they are essentially control surfaces and can cause strange turbulence and vortices around the wings, which alters the way it flies. This, plus having surfaces designed around moving air that are non-functional during forward flight, will reduce your efficiency. And (in general) making a fixed wing drone is about trying...