Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1: Design and build land, air, and sea drones using Ardupilot with Pixhawk 2.1

by Ty Audronis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786465443
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	12/29/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	171 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Ty Audronis has been called a "technology-age renaissance man." He's a professional drone pilot, post-production specialist in the entertainment and media industries, a highly experienced interactive game developer, and an accomplished digital artist. He's worked for companies ranging from frog Design to California Academy of Sciences in roles where he's worn many hats.
Ty's been programming software and games since 1981 (when he was 8 years old) professionally. He majored in “Computer Generated Animation and Visual Effects” in college (where he won “Best Animation” for the entire CSU system – a Rosebud Award). His music and sound design have been the soundtrack on several major productions; he has also served as a visual effects supervisor on feature films and was the supervising editor and animator for award-winning science visualizations. He has been building drones since the days when sensors and components had to be torn out of cell phones and game controllers.
Ty is also a mentor, having taught many interns his skills, and speaks regularly at venues including Interdrone. He also serves on the advisory board for the Society of Aerial Cinematographers and for Genarts (now Boris) Sapphire.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Drones 101
2. Your First Drone: An Autonomous RC Car
3. A Drone for Hunters – Autonomous Duck Decoy
4. A Drone for Golfers
5. Introduction to UAVs
6. A Simple Multicopter Drone
7. The Holy Grail - A Fixed Wing Drone
8. The Principles of VTOL with Pixhawk
9. Programming the Ardupilot