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

The assembly


Before we get into the parts and specific placement thereof, let's take a quick look at the sketch for this drone:

I know but what can I say? I like to sketch out my ideas over a bottle of wine.

The peripherals we're using are the same as all our other drones, with the addition of a pitot tube. We talked about pitot tubes before, but as a quick refresher, a pitot tube is simply a device that measures the air-speed of your aircraft. Think about it—speed is relative. Believe it or not, even when you're standing still, you're traveling at 113,000 mph. Yes, that's right... why? Because the Earth rotates at 1,000 mph + the Earth around the sun is 67,000 mph, plus the solar system's speed through the universe is 45,000 mph. But on Earth, your speed is 0 mph because your speed is measured relative to the ground (Earth).

So when flying, you have two speeds—your ground speed (your speed relative to the Earth), and your air speed (your speed through the air). Think about it. If you're traveling...