Fully autonomous unmanned systems are important technological and engineering wonders of today's world. All autonomous unmanned systems need an autopilot that controls the behaviors and working mechanism of the unmanned platform and controls the platform by semi-autonomous or fully autonomous.

The ArduPilot project provides an advanced, full-featured, and reliable open source autopilot software system. The Ardupilot software system is capable of controlling almost any vehicle system imaginable: conventional and VTOL airplanes, gliders, multi-rotors, helicopters, sailboats, powered boats, submarines, ground vehicles, and even balance robots. The supported vehicle types frequently expand as use cases emerge for new and novel platforms.

This course covers some of the most important aspects of software development for controlling and monitoring Ardupilot autopilot software system-powered unmanned autonomous systems.

In this course, you are going to learn the following:

• Ability to setup and run Ardupilot autopilot simulation environment.

• Developing Python programming language scripts that communicate with Ardupilot software system using Dronekit library.

• Understanding MAVLink messages and creating custom scripts using Python programming language and PyMAVLink library.

• Learn how to use the MAVProxy Command Line Ground Control Station and what it does.

• Autopilot onboard software development using LUA programming language.

• Custom embedded software development with Ardupilot autopilot software system.

In this course, there are also supplementary sample projects, assignments, and resources to gain hands-on experience to work with the Ardupilot autopilot software system.