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

Configuring Pixhawk and Mission Planner


We're going to set this up in several very cool ways. Here are our goals:

  1. Get the basic configuration of Pixhawk installed for multicopter operation.
  2. Hook up our FPV camera so that we receive the signal on the ground, and put it up in the Mission Planner interface. This way, we can watch one screen to get all our information.

 

  1. Set up a set of joysticks so that we can fly the multicopter with traditional helicopter-style (real-world) controls.

So, without further delay let's get started on this!

The initial configuration of Pixhawk

Obviously, plug in your Pixhawk to your computer via USB, connect to it in Mission Planner, and start up the wizard. First, let's run through the multirotor version of the setup wizard, and then we'll tweak things:

We're going to walk through each screen. By now, a lot of this will just be old hat. But still, information is better said and not needed than needed and not said.

Of course, select Multirotor as our vehicle type. Then...