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

Summary


Wow, that was certainly a lot of information to take in, but at least the foundation is laid and now we can get to the fun parts! In this chapter, we learned about all the different types of drones. We also discussed some potential uses and markets for drone technology. Finally, we went over the power of the Pixhawk platform and gave you a high-level overview of how the connections plug into the Pixhawk and what each port is for. Don't worry if you're a bit confounded. It was an awful lot of information, but it will become much clearer when you see it in practice in the chapters to follow.

Now, get ready, because we're diving straight into implementing the Pixhawk into your first vehicle. In the next chapter, we'll be altering a simple RC car and using a Pixhawk to make it into an autonomous rover. A rover with an added boost, that is.