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

Config/Tuning screen


As the name implies, this area is where the Pixhawk administrator would configure and tune the aircraft. Since some of these menus are only available with an advanced layout, first we'll cover the Planner section (which will give you access to all the advanced features).

Planner

The following screenshot shows the options for the Planner tab. This is the area where we configure the Mission Planner software itself:

There are many options for setting up Mission Planner on your ground control station. Let's take a look at each one of them:

  • Video Device: As we saw in the Multicopter chapter, this is where you would specify a video capture device (hooked up to a video receiver) to display the video taken onboard the drone. Using the Start and Stop buttons starts and stops the video from being displayed behind the HUD on the Flight Data screen (in place of an artificial horizon).
  • Video Format: This specifies the format for incoming video.
  • OSD Color: This lets you set the color for...