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

Chapter 4. A Drone for Golfers

As we've stated a few times before, when choosing an industry to make a drone for, you have to balance the size of the market (demand), with how much money they have to spend (cost), and how easy it will be for you to fill that demand (supply).

One of the industries that is extremely popular is golf. Every year, consumers literally spend billions of dollars on golf equipment and accessories. One thing golfers go nuts about is the new technology to help their game. Sounds pretty much perfect, right?

So, where can a drone fit in? A multicopter to fly down the fairway and check the layout? Maybe, but if the golfer has played that course before, why would they need it? They wouldn't. Ok, that's a bad idea. What about a submarine drone to look for a golf ball that went into the water hazard? Not a terrible idea, but there are probably so many balls sitting at the bottom of a water hazard that finding your own ball may prove impossibly difficult. And who wants to keep...