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 Plan Screen


The following image shows the Flight Plan Screen (without fixed-wing tuning mission loaded):

The main window shows a satellite map of the mission area. The yellow lines represent the desired path of the vehicle, while the white circles represent the area for the turning arc (turning radius). The green markers represent the actual waypoint targets for the mission.

The bottom window is a chart representing all of the parameters for the mission. In this window, you can add events (such as Do Jump, which sends the vehicle back to a specific waypoint). If your camera is attached to Pixhawk, you can tell the camera to take an image/start recording. Flight modes can be set to change as well (such as "Land"). Any command Pixhawk is capable of executing can be triggered using this interface.

The window on the far right allows you to save missions for later use (to your computer), load previous missions, change the type of satellite map. Different maps can prove to be more/less...