Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

Ardupilot 101 – A quick overview of Pixhawk 2.1

The Ardupilot platform (based on the Arduino robotics platform) has been around for a long time. In 2007, it was conceived by a company called 3D Robotics. It's an open code-base (fully programmable), and has exploded in its versatility and capabilities since 2013 with the advent of the Pixhawk line. The latest version (2.1 at the time of the authoring of this book) implements even more versatility and stability through the capabilities of expanding the processing power via the optional Intel Edison Compute Module, and the addition of the cube. The cube contains a triple-redundancy sensor array of gyros, accelerometers, magnetometers, and barometers housed in a cushioned cube-shaped platform ...