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

Kitbashing


Kitbashing is a term coined in the cinematic miniature (the art of making miniatures for visual effects) world. It generally means buying pre-formed models (such as model airplanes made of plastic to be displayed on a shelf), taking parts from that kit, and combining it with others (or your own custom parts) to create something new. For instance, you can see parts of the original Star Wars Millenium Falcon that include guns and exhausts from various military model kits.

Some purists may think of this as cheating. They are amateurs. Professionals do it all the time. After all, where time is money, why reinvent something that already exists?

Throughout this book, we're going to use the same philosophy. We're going to take dumb objects and make them smart with the Pixhawk controller and components. On some projects, we'll even go full-kitbashing by combining two or more objects into one smart object.