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.