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

What is 360 VR video, and why make a drone for it?


A 360 VR video is exactly what it sounds like: a camera that shoots video across 360° in every direction (a full sphere). It allows a user wearing VR goggles (such as Oculus Rift) to look in any direction during the playback of the video (rather than being restricted to a single field of view with traditional cameras). Also, phones and other mobile devices can be used to view 360 video by moving the device (like a window into the VR world) in any direction. Pretty cool, huh?

Since early humans looked to the sky and saw their first bird, we've dreamed of flight. From Superman to Jessica Jones, people have capitalized on people's idolization of flight. So, why not us? With 360 VR video in the air, we can take people into the air, and let them fly. With some special software in postproduction, the drone can even be removed from the picture giving the wearer of a VR headset a fully immersive experience in flight without looking out a window.

But...