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

Using tank locomotion


Tank style locomotion is where there are no steerable wheels. Rather, wheels on one side of a vehicle move forward, while the wheels on the other side either stay stationary, or reverse (as illustrated in the following diagram). This is also called skid-steering:

This kind of locomotion is great because vehicles can literally turn on a dime (in place). However, the drawback is that it can be jerky when turning while going forward. But as there's no sensitive equipment (just golf clubs), we don't really care if there's jostling of the clubs during turns. All we really want is to make this as inexpensive and simple as possible. You may notice that the front wheel is fixed (doesn't pivot as a caster would). This is of no concern to us as when steering occurs, the front wheel doesn't have a lot of weight on it (the center of gravity is right on top of the main wheels' axle). Therefore, the friction is minimal. If it turns out to be a problem, we can always replace the front...