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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Seitenzahl: 273
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1
Copyright © 2017 Packt Publishing
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.
Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: December 2017
Production reference: 1271217
ISBN 978-1-78646-916-8
www.packtpub.com
Credits
Author
Ty Audronis
Copy Editor
Laxmi Subramanian
Reviewer
Ayan Pahwa
Ersin Gonul
Project Coordinator
Shweta H Birwatkar
Commissioning Editor
Kartikey Pandey
Proofreader
Safis Editing
Acquisition Editor
Prachi Bisht
Indexer
Aishwarya Gangawane
Content Development Editor
Dattatraya More
Graphics
Tania Dutta
Technical Editor
Sneha Hanchate
Production Coordinator
Melywn Dsa
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 has worked for companies ranging from frog Design to California Academy of Sciences in roles, where he has worn many hats. Ty has 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). 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.
About the Reviewer
Ayan Pahwa is an embedded software engineer from New Delhi, India currently working at Mentor Graphics - a Siemens business with 5 plus years of experience in building and racing first person view multi-rotor drones. His professional work areas mainly focus on embedded firmware, device drivers, automotive IoT, and Linux system programming. He has co-founded SDIoT for flourishing drone and other new technologies within local communities. His drone aerial videos can be viewed on his YouTube channel.
Ersin Gonul is a senior design engineer at Turkish Aerospace Industries in Ankara, Turkey. Previously Gonul worked as R & D engineer for companies which they develop unmanned aerial vehicles. He graduated with honors from Selcuk University in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and also he holds a Master degree of Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Hacettepe University, Ankara. His expertise based on helicopter autopilots and unmanned systems. He is passionate about aviation, multicopters, VTOLs and their control systems. He also holds a Private Pilot License (PPL-H).
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Table of Contents
Preface
What this book covers
What you need for this book
Who this book is for
Conventions
Reader feedback
Customer support
Downloading the color images of this book
Errata
Piracy
Questions
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
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
Summary
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!
Summary
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
Summary
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
Summary
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
Summary
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
Summary
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
Summary
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
Summary
Preface
We live in the drone age. Drones currently serve purposes in defense, entertainment, and in some countries, package delivery. However, the drone age is still in its infancy. There are a plethora of uses for drones that are just on the cusp of being discovered; drones for mapping, drones for convenience, and even drones for scientific research.
This book will walk you through the design process for drones that navigate the air, land, and even the sea. We will show you how to come up with ideas, overcome the limitations of budget and current technology, and implement them. However, a drone without a "brain" is just an RC vehicle. We’ll show you how to integrate the Pixhawk 2.1 guidance system into your drone and how to add peripherals and sensors to Pixhawk to make ordinary RC vehicles into smart drones that serve purposes.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Drones 101, introduces you to the world of drones and explains that there are many types of drones. We also give you a high-level overview of Ardupilot and Pixhawk flight controller systems. Finally, we walk you through some of the safety best practices to minimize the risks associated with prototyping new drones.
Chapter 2, Your First Drone - An Autonomous RC Car, walks you through kitbashing (using an existing) RC car and turning it into a surface drone (a rover). We show you the basics of designing, 3D-printing, and even molding new parts for your rover to adapt it to Pixhawk. You will be given even more familiarity with the plugs on the Pixhawk 2.1 board and how sensors are attached, as well as a basic overview of the Mission Planner interface. By the end of this chapter, you will have an understanding of how to create a rover using Pixhawk 2.1, a GPS sensor, and a remote telemetry transmitter.
Chapter 3, A Drone for Hunters – Autonomous Duck Decoy, takes the principles of a rover and applies them to the open water. This chapter focuses largely on the process of coming up with a marketable idea and planning your design. You will be shown how to cannibalize parts from an RC boat and implement them into a custom 3D-printed hull (a duck). We will also educate you on the pitfalls of a water drone with regards to waterproofing, ballast, and even water-cooling your drive motor.
Chapter 4, A Drone for Golfers, takes purpose-built rovers to the next level by showing you that drones can fit into almost any market demographic: in this case, golf. We will build a golf trolley on an existing RC golf trolley’s frame and motor system. It implements skid-steering and Bluetooth for telemetry and control, enabling it to follow a golfer that is carrying a phone in their pocket. Also, we will integrate a new sensor: a LIDAR rangefinder that allows the trolley to avoid obstacles while it follows the golfer autonomously.
Chapter 5, Introduction to UAVs, transitions the reader from the surface to the air. Aerial drones represent a whole new level of complexity. With weight considerations, balance, and safety concerns being the focus of this chapter, you will learn to think more like an aeronautical engineer when designing your aerial drones.
Chapter 6, A Simple Multicopter Drone, shows the reader how to build and tune a multicopter drone. We adopt a “GoPro” gimbal (designed to stabilize a GoPro camera) to hold a 360° VR camera (a Ricoh Theta S). We also walk you step-by-step through the Mission Planner interface to get a ground station up and running, which will display a video on a laptop screen, along with the heads-up display and even allows you to fly the drone using gaming joysticks.
Chapter 7, The Holy Grail - A Fixed Wing Drone, walks you through designing and setting up a fixed-wing drone. We will integrate an airspeed sensor (pitot tube) and use a rangefinder again but this time to sense altitude from the ground to assist with autonomous landings. This chapter largely focuses on the Mission Planner software. Using it to tune a fixed-wing drone to fly properly, we will execute autonomous missions and even land with no input from the pilot.
Chapter 8, The Principles of VTOL with Pixhawk, is a bonus chapter added due to the popular demand from the drone community. VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) drones are airplanes that can also hover and land/take off like a helicopter. Rather than build a drone in this chapter, we walk you through the concepts of planning, building, and tuning a VTOL aircraft.
Chapter 9, Programming Ardupilot, is largely a reference chapter designed to give you quick reference to the Mission Planner interface and all of the basic parameters therein.
What you need for this book
This book guides you through building various types of drones by example. You do not have to buy all of the materials, nor even build along-side. All this book really requires from you is an imagination, which we hope to spark by example.
Who this book is for
This book is intended beginners and intermediate drone enthusiasts. But at some point, even professional designers may benefit from the book’s contents.
Conventions
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The next lines of code read the link and assigns it to the to theBeautifulSoupfunction."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In order to download new modules, we will go toFiles| Settings|Project Name|Project Interpreter."
Reader feedback
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of. To send us general feedback, simply email [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Customer support
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Downloading the color images of this book
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/DesigningPurposeBuiltDronesforArdupilotPixhawk21_ColorImages.pdf.
Errata
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
Piracy
Piracy of copyrighted material on the internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.
Questions
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.
Drones 101
Congratulations! You've taken the first step into the exciting world of designing and developing your very own purpose-built drone. Humankind has constantly been pushing the edges of their technology. Our technological progression is built into our DNA so thoroughly that we mark complete eras of our history with the technological state of the art. The Bronze Age, the Industrial Era, Space-Age, Information Age, and now the "Drone Era." It truly is exciting to live in the drone era. Well, we have a lot to cover, so let's get started:
We'll be covering the following topics in this chapter:
Introduction to drones
Purposes for drones
Types of drones
Ardupilot 101
Safety and best practices
Introduction to drones
What is a drone? Twenty years ago, the answer was easy. Ignoring the definitions having to do with insects, a drone was a term strictly used for a military autonomous flying vehicle. Drones were (mostly) used for target practice or for gathering intelligence (reconnaissance). Along came a company called Dragan that made one of the first commercially available quadrocopters (the DraganFlyer) and the term Quad Helicopter was born.
Their first commercially available multicopter was simply called the Quad Helicopter and came out in 1997 (it is shown in the following image):
In the 2000s, the term drone became synonymous with military strikes. Between the United States Presidents Bush and Obama, the United States racked up many attacks on targets with connections to terrorism. So, the term "drone" had an ominous implication.
In 2010, Parrot came out with a multicopter that implemented augmented reality (AR) on a cell phone. This game allowed players to shoot down each other's real-life multicopters. The multicopter was titled the AR Drone (probably as a marketing attempt to capitalize on the ominous nature of the term drone). Really, it was the first multicopter you could buy in your local shopping mall and plaza (it was available at all Sharper Image stores). The public finally had its first look at multicopters. There it was—Drone stamped in all-caps on the front of the box.
Who could resist? I had spent days, weeks, years (even) building drones by tearing apart other electronics to get accelerometers, GPS modules, and other components to build my own drone. Could it really be so easy that all I had to do was go down to the mall and buy one? Yes. The following image shows me in 2010 testing out an AR Drone bought from Sharper Image:
In 2011, the glory of military drones got a big stain. It turned out that these surgical drone strikes were sometimes taking out civilians, US citizens in foreign countries, and missing terrorists all together. Suddenly the term drone was becoming something that the general public associated with fear and even rage. Protests ensued (as shown in the following image):
Soon, turnkey systems (like the DJI Phantom) were available with cameras already installed and sold at big-box retailers. This led to privacy concerns from opponents to the craft. They had been handed a new term for multicopters on a silver platter, a term that struck fear and loathing into the hearts of people all around the planet. A term even synonymous with murder-drone. In the following image, you can see the first in the line of DJI Phantom drones:
The multicopter community resisted the term drone with all its might. People were in hysterics. In Santa Rosa, California (2013), a police officer even confiscated a property owner's drone. He was flying it over his own vineyards and posting the videos on YouTube. The police officer stated that it would be a matter of months before you saw fly by shootings. The police department had no legal standing and was forced to return the Phantom.
Legislators around the country were making local laws against drones. In Los Angeles (the area that hosts Hollywood and the bulk of the aerial cinematography industry), drones were outlawed. (Later these laws would be overturned as the FAA finally stepped in and stated that local and state governments had no jurisdiction over airspace.) At the time, it looked as if drones may just go the way of the condor. But then something wonderful happened.
The industry stopped resisting the term drone. I remember on my first drone book with Packt, Building Multicopter Video Drones, resisting the word drone in the title. But they convinced me it would be good for search engine food. As we (in the industry) stopped resisting the term and started educating the public about the safety, best practices, and usefulness of drones the negative implications lost all meaning. And (as in the following image), drones even took on an entirely new meaning:
Suddenly, drones were saving lives (with search and rescue), helping people recover from disasters (with assessment of damage, as shown in the following image), and responsible for great shots in feature films and people's favourite documentaries. Then, something completely weird happened:
Drones were no longer multicopters. The term covered anything that flew under remote control. This happened with the FAA's small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS) rules. The media dubbed these rules drone legislation. Suddenly, drones had wings, even jet engines. Now, they didn't even have to fly autonomously, the radio-controlled airplane that grandpa flew on weekends was a drone.
Then, it went further. The guidance systems used in multicopter drones were being repurposed to control ground vehicles (rovers) and water vehicles (boats and submersibles). Now, in 2017, you actually hear companies coming out with underwater drones.
In short, the answer to the original question, "What (exactly) is a drone?" is simply a robot-a vehicle of any type that is either not controlled by a human (autonomous) or controlled by a human via remote control. It may not be the Oxford English Dictionary's definition, but it is the definition that the common public accepts when they hear the word drone.
And, as for the proof that we're living in the Drone Era? In the height of the space age (the mid-1980s), men on rocket packs flew into stadiums for the opening ceremonies for the 1984 Olympics, and even during the Super Bowl XIX half-time show. Now, we have drone-shows for those same venues. Of course, we still have a ways to go for full-tilt drone acceptance. After all, the drone part of the half-time show had to be filmed days earlier for fear of a drone attack during the show, or at least fear of mass hysteria in the venue. But we'll take it.
Purposes for drones
Drones are just for taking pictures, right? Wrong! Drones can be useful for just about anything and everything. Here are just a few examples:
Suffering in a drought (hello, California) but need to water your crops? You can use a drone to map your whole farm. Then, run analysis on crop health, so that you know where to direct water. All the while sipping iced tea on your porch.
Want to walk the golf course, but don't want to hire a caddy or carry your own clubs? Caddy drone to the rescue! Make a motorized golf trolley, and have it follow the GPS signal on your cell phone as your walk the golf course.
Maybe you're a herpetologist on an expedition to a remote location and you found a new species of tree frog. Get it back to base-camp from miles away in an autonomous powered glider. Just load the frog into the payload bay, give it a toss above the treeline and let it fly (and land at) home! Then, just wait for base camp to get the specimen and send the powered glider back to you for your expedition to continue.
You're a lifeguard at a beach and see someone having trouble. Launch an aerial drone that drops a boat-drone to tow the person back to shore. All the while, you don't have to leave your station (leaving the rest of the beach-goers without a lifeguard). You can meet the victim at the beach with medical supplies you may need and you're not too exhausted to help out!
The list goes on and on and on. If you can think of something requiring delivery of an item, manual labour requiring movement to another location, or just something to save time, a purpose for a drone will be found. The possibilities are quite literally limitless.
The following image shows the (Israeli Defense Force) Air Mule. It is an autonomous ambulance drone designed to go into the battlefield and airlift wounded soldiers and civilians back to a medical facility at over 100 miles per hour, all with no pilot onboard:
There is some fear that drones will eventually replace people on certain jobs. This fear is slowly being realized with autonomous cars (as UBER is talking about rolling out). After all, these are drones too. However, I prefer to think of it as freeing people from the mundane tasks in favour of the pursuit of their imaginations (like figuring out more uses for drones). Besides, people are still needed to maintain drones, monitor them, and analyse the data they provide. (At least until artificial intelligence (AI) is better at abstracting ideas and problem solving.)
It goes even further than a single drone for a single purpose though. With swarming, multiple drones can specialize in parts of a task and cooperate to achieve a very complicated result. For instance:
Geologists deploying swarms of aerial drones to get infra-red imagery of fault lines while additional swarms of rovers (with seismic sensors) can monitor those fault lines for activity. That sort of purpose can save thousands of lives.
Swarms of submersible micro-drones in the oceans can monitor currents and track tidal-waves headed toward land. They could even be powered using the kinetic energy of the currents to generate their electricity. People could be evacuated in time to save them.
In the event of a natural disaster, electricity (and therefore communications) is the cause of many casualties. A swarm of communication drones (cell tower repeater replacements) can fan out across a country to re-establish the communication networks in a matter of minutes.
These are certainly some altruistic and noble uses for swarming, but the military also sees the benefit of drone swarms. The following image shows a recent test of drone swarms (deployed by dropping them from a pair of f-18 Hornets) used to map out a battle-field in real-time for mission commanders and soldiers on the ground:
Drone swarms can also be used by the entertainment industry to cover sporting events, if one drone is running low on batteries, another takes off to take its place. Drone swarms could be deployed over golf courses to help enthusiasts find their ill-hit balls that have gone off into the weeds. Farmers could use drone swarms to monitor crops, plant seeds, monitor watering patterns (and waste from evaporating water, or atomized sprinklers going into the air).
Again, the uses for drones are limitless.
We could list potential uses for drones all day, all night, every day, and every year, for our lifetimes. So, how do we realize this potential?
Well, to figure out how to make drones, we'll always first start off with how to implement existing tech and components to make what we want. The first step is to think in terms of what types of drones exist currently.
Types of drones
Drones come in two categories with several subcategories. There are surface/subsurface drones, and aerial drones. Let's dive further into each.
USV drones
USV simply stands for either Unmanned Surface Vehicle or Unmanned Submersible Vehicle. The same acronym of USV is used for both. These types of drones are usually referred to as Rovers or Submersibles respectively.
Rovers
Rovers usually either have treads (like a tank) or wheels (like a car). The Mars Rovers are great examples of USV Rovers. They move along the surface of Mars taking various readings and measurements in an effort to explore the surface of another planet without the risk to human life. The following picture shows one of these Mars Rovers:
Not every endeavor for a rover needs to be quite so lofty as to explore another planet. Rovers are currently used in aspects of our daily lives (the iRobot Roomba is a daily life example of a USV Rover) all the way through exploring our own planet (rovers designed to explore lava flows—areas far too dangerous and inhospitable to humans).
However, rovers don't have to simply be driven across the ground. Some rovers are actually boats designed to skid across the surface of water for various purposes. An example of boat-drone USV is the one designed by the US Navy to escort ships through pirate-ridden waters, and protect naval vessels from other hostile vessels in dangerous waters (eliminating, or at least reducing, the need for bloated battle-groups).
In this book, we will be designing three surface rovers:
