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


Well, there you have it. If we made it seem simple, we apologize. This is the absolute most complex configuration you can embark on (for the hybrid we chose the simpler "Quadplane"). If you ever choose to do a VTOL, we'd love to see your results!

In this chapter, you learned about the different types of VTOL aircraft, and how to set up the simplest flavor of VTOLs. You've learned about all of the hook-ups, design concepts, and limitations of different designs. Finally, we walked you through all of the firmware settings needed to get it to work.

In the next chapter, we'll cover some of the basics of actually digging into the firmware and settings of Ardupilot and manipulating it to customize it even further.