December 2017
Intermediate to advanced
272 pages
6h 45m
English
Content preview from Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1
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The Holy Grail - A Fixed Wing Drone
Wow for a holy grail, she sure is one ugly pig, right? Well, prototypes just aren't usually pretty. So, why is a fixed wing drone (like the airplane in the following image) considered a holy grail?
The answer is pretty simple, actually. Airplanes need to keep moving in order to stay airborne. Go too slow, and you stall (a fancy word for fall from the sky until you build up speed again except that it's usually vertical speed, and vertical speed is going down).
With multicopters, tuning them is fairly easy: take it off, hover just outside of ground effect (OGE), and let it twitch around a bit. If it's too ...