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Drone Lab: A Hands-On Platform for Drone Simulation and Indoor Flight Testing

Drone Lab is a fully integrated indoor testing environment designed for advancing education and research in drone technology. It features compact and durable quadcopters that are ideal for experimental learning in guidance, navigation, and control systems. The platform is built upon powerful open-source tools such as PX4®, ROS, Gazebo, and QGroundControl, and allows users to design, simulate, and deploy custom flight controllers using MATLAB® and Simulink®.

What sets Drone Lab apart is its ability to deliver high-precision tracking through a motion capture system, offering real-time position and orientation data. This makes it an excellent tool for conducting reliable and repeatable flight experiments. Developers can fine-tune their algorithms in a realistic software environment using SITL (Software-in-the-Loop) simulations, and seamlessly transition those solutions to actual flight conditions indoors.

Whether you are a student looking to gain hands-on experience, a teacher planning classroom experiments, or a researcher testing advanced UAV algorithms, Drone Lab provides the tools to bring your concepts into action. Tools like SLXtoPX4 and DroneCmd simplify controller development and drone interaction through Simulink and MATLAB, bridging the gap between theoretical study and practical application in flight robotics and autonomous systems.