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 Flight Data interface


The following image shows the flight data interface for Mission Planner:

The top-left window represents the Heads-up Display (HUD)—where you can instantly tell the orientation, altitude, and status of the aircraft. Warning messages appear as red text (such as the DISARMED and Bad AHRS warnings we see in the image).

The large window is a projected satellite map showing the location of the aircraft/multicopter/rover (in this case, a fixed wing aircraft). Protruding from the aircraft is a purple line representing the direction the aircraft is pointing at.

The window on the lower-left shows current data with several tabs to see data presented in different formats, and even transmits signals to the Pixhawk. The tabs are follows:

  • Quick: These are the numerical values of basic telemetry data from the vehicle.
  • Actions: This allows the user to send commands to Pixhawk such as Loiter, Arm, and so on.
  • PreFlight: This shows a checklist and status for preflight before launching the...