Designing purpose-build drones for ArdupilotPixhawk 2.1

Design and make land, air, and sea drones

About This Book

• Navigate through the complexities of Ardupilot to put together a complete functional UAV and assemble your Drone
• Learn through practical examples that helps you build robust UAV flight and ground control components
• Explore the best practices used by top industry professionals that not only help you build Drone systems in time, but build effective solutions to cater to

Who This Book Is For

This primary audience for this book is anyone (enthusiasts and hobbyists) who dream of building their own Drones. It will also help those who are trying to build UAVs for commercial purposes.Some prior experience of microcontrollers and electronics would be useful.

What You Will Learn

• Kitbashing "dumb" objects into smart ones
• Program a Pixhawk for your drones
• Fabricate your own parts out of several materials
• Integrate Pixhawk into a drone
• Build and understand the significant difference between Land, sea, and air drones
• Adapt old Pixhawk sensors to the new Pixhawk 2.1 plugs
• Get familiar with the procedures of testing your new drones

In Detail

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.

Through this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and how to start exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance and so on). This book will help individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn how to make the most of the available Ardupilot technology to build, monitor, and control your Drones. The book will also cover specific practical examples to:-Perform step-by-step instructions to quickly assemble the drone you always wanted, To build lightweight, yet effective ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl and MissionPlanner, Use critical software libraries and toold from the ROS framework to build robotic applications on to your Drone, Build customized applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV using DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication)