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

Spec-ing out the parts


We know we want something stable that can fly for decent periods of time. So it should be easy, right? Wrong. We can't just buy a Phantom and stick a 360 camera on it. The footage will be unstable. So we'll need something that has (what's known as) a gimbal on it. A camera gimbal (usually) uses brushless motors to counteract the tilt of a multirotor vehicle. Multirotors (as we said before) tilt to travel in different directions. We don't want our camera tilting along with it. Otherwise, every course correction will send viewers tilting and twitching in all sorts of ways. We want very smooth footage. You can see what a camera gimbal looks like in the following image:

Of course, our proof of concept gimbal won't be anything near this elaborate but the principle of their operation is the same. We need something to dampen vibration, and counter the constant tilting and rolling of a multicopter.

But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. What's a nice, inexpensive camera...