Building Your Own Drones: A Beginner’s Guide to Drones, UAVs, and ROVs

11. Waterborne Drone Project

In this book you’ve learned about seemingly every kind of drone imaginable, but there are still more types to discover! In this chapter, you build the waterborne drone, a floating robot with soda-bottle pontoons, which is shown in Figure 11.1. Before you get to the project, however, you’ll need to understand the advantages and disadvantages of building water-based drones. You’ll also learn about two important topics: how to waterproof your electronics, and how to set up an XBee mesh network, which is another way to control a drone. You’ll use this know-how to build a remotely controlled boat steered by a cool little handheld controller you’ll assemble yourself.

FIGURE 11.1 The Soda Bottle Boat explores a body of ...