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 Initial Setup screen


The following screenshot shows the initial setup screen's Install Firmware tab. This screen allows you to repurpose a Pixhawk module for other applications (such as Rover):

Wizard

The following screenshot shows the interface that pops up when clicking on the Wizard tab. This is a step-by-step configuration wizard to help get the basic setup of your Pixhawk in place:

Mandatory hardware

This section allows you to calibrate/setup all of the peripherals that are required to make Pixhawk drive your vehicle properly. Let's take a look at each:

  • Accel Calibration: This allows to calibrate the accelerometers. You'll want to do this if you are getting a Bad AHRS error in the Flight Data screen. Simply enter this menu and click on Calibrate Accelerometer to open the calibration wizard. The Calibrate Level button lets you calibrate the correct level position of Pixhawk. This is essential for the aircraft, otherwise they may pitch/roll when Pixhawk believes it is flying level. In...