Designing purpose-built drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1 : build drones with Ardupilot / Ty Audronis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Audronis, Ty, 1973- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Drone aircraft--Control systems.

Drone aircraft.

Drone aircraft--Design and construction.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (254 pages) : illustrations

Edition:

1st edition

Place of Publication:

Birmingham, UK : Packt Publishing, 2017.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Design and build land, air, and sea drones using Ardupilot with Pixhawk 2.1 About This Book Explore the best practices used by the top industry professionals that will not only help you build drones in time, but also build effective solutions to cater to. Navigate through the complexities of Ardupilot to put together a complete functional UAV and assemble your drone Learn through practical examples that help you build robust UAV flight and ground control components Who This Book Is For The 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 with microcontrollers and electronics would be useful. What You Will Learn Kitbash "dumb" objects into smart ones Program Pixhawk for your drones Fabricate your own parts out of different materials Integrate Pixhawk into different types of drones Build and understand the significant difference between land, sea, and air drones Adapt old Pixhawk sensors to the new Pixhawk 2.1 plugs Become familiar with procedures for 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. 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. Style and approach Step-by-step instructions to help assemble your first drone with the Ardupilot platform.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Customer Feedback

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Drones 101

Introduction to drones

Purposes for drones

Types of drones

USV drones

Rovers

Submersibles

UAV drones

Multirotors

Fixed-wing drones - airplanes

Hybrid drones - VTOL

Helicopter drones

Dirigible drones - Blimps

Ardupilot 101 - A quick overview of Pixhawk 2.1

Safety and best practices

Summary

Chapter 2: Your First Drone - An Autonomous RC Car

Our rover

Kitbashing

Rustler VXL

Planning and limitations

Identifying the components

Planning the placement of Pixhawk

3D modeling, printing, and silicone molding

Measure five times, print once

Model it in 3D

Print it in 3D

Preparing for molding

Pouring the mould

Demolding and curing

Hooking up your Pixhawk

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Radio telemetry

RC receiver

Connecting the brain to the body

Programming the Pixhawk for our (basic) rover

The wizard

More calibration...

Testing and driving

Setting waypoints

Chapter 3: A Drone for Hunters - Autonomous Duck Decoy

Spawning a marketable deal

Outlining the scope before you design

Choosing the kitbash boat

Designing the duck body for 3D printing

The basics of 3D modeling

Modeling with subdivs

Box modeling 101

Knifing polygons

Extruding and shifting

Making the duck hollow

Freezing curves into polygons - subdividing

Booleans

Printing large 3D models

Testing for water-tightness

Installing the propulsion system

Steering and electronics

Hooking everything up!

Chapter 4: A Drone for Golfers

The design

Using tank locomotion

Adapting Pixhawk for skid-steering.

Using Bluetooth to control Pixhawk with a phone

Using LIDAR to avoid obstacles

LIDAR 101

Making LIDAR work

Mounting the module

Configuring LIDAR with Mission Planner

Chapter 5: Introduction to UAVs

Safety concerns

Propellers - flying cuisinarts

Designing for air versus ground

Weight

Power/lift

Fuel - battery

Learning some physics

Designing a multicopter airframe

Symmetry

Even numbers

Blade clearance

Designing a fixed wing - airplane

Wing design

Chapter 6: A Simple Multicopter Drone

What is 360 VR video, and why make a drone for it?

Spec-ing out the parts

Starting with the payload

Choosing the gimbal

Landing gear

A first-person view - FPV system

The actual aerial platform - drone

Batteries

Running the numbers

Assembling the drone

Too many freakin' wires!

GPS on a stick

Rails are awesome

Anything loose? Tuck it away and tie it down

Hooking up the ESCs to Pixhawk

Configuring Pixhawk and Mission Planner

The initial configuration of Pixhawk

Configuring the ground station

Using joysticks to control a drone

Setting up video

Final configuration before test flights

Chapter 7: The Holy Grail - A Fixed Wing Drone

Why this particular airplane kit?

The assembly

Placing the Pixhawk

Placing the components

Tuning a fixed wing aircraft with mission planner

Configuring the pitot tube

Setting up the LIDAR range finder

Setting up for tuning

Fixed wing flight modes

Setting flight modes

Autotune level

The tuning process

Your maiden flight

AUTOTUNE flight

Taking off and getting ready to tune

Entering AUTOTUNE

How to fly in AUTOTUNE

Testing AUTOTUNE

Autopilot tune

Setting up the mission

Flying the tuning mission

Auto-landing tuning

TECS tuning.

Testing and fine tuning TECS

Auto-landing setup and parameters

The testing

Chapter 8: The Principles of VTOL with Pixhawk

The types of VTOL

The hybrid VTOL

Thrust vectored VTOL

Designing your first VTOL

The challenge

The simple gets more complex

The (re-imagined) airframe

Creating our shopping list

The final plan

Implementing Pixhawk

Test and tune before making the leap

Setting up the firmware

Quadplane flight modes

Transitioning from VTOL to airplane

Recommended VTOL RTL procedure

Notes before attempting any transitions

Chapter 9: Programming Ardupilot

The Flight Data interface

The Flight Plan Screen

The Initial Setup screen

Wizard

Mandatory hardware

Optional hardware

Config/Tuning screen

Planner

Flight Modes

Basic Tuning

Standard Params

Advanced Params

Full Parameter List

Full Parameter Tree

The Simulation Screen

Mission Planner terminal

Index.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBC, viewed February 6, 2018).

OCLC:

1020496942