Connecting to a Vehicle¶

The connection to the vehicle (or multiple vehicles) is set up within the DroneKit script. Scripts import and call the connect() method. After connecting this returns a Vehicle object from which you can get/set parameters and attributes, and control vehicle movement.

The most common way to call connect() is shown below:

from dronekit import connect

# Connect to the Vehicle (in this case a UDP endpoint)
vehicle = connect('127.0.0.1:14550', wait_ready=True)

The first parameter specifies the target address (in this case the loopback address for UDP port 14550). See Connection string options for the strings to use for other common vehicles.

The second parameter (wait_ready) is used to determine whether connect() returns immediately on connection or if it waits until some vehicle parameters and attributes are populated. In most cases you should use wait_ready=True to wait on the default set of parameters.

Connecting over a serial device will look something like this:

from dronekit import connect

# Connect to the Vehicle (in this case a UDP endpoint)
vehicle = connect('/dev/ttyAMA0', wait_ready=True, baud=57600)

connect() also has arguments for setting the baud rate, the length of the connection timeout, and/or to use a custom vehicle class.

There is more documentation on all of the parameters in the API Reference.