Drone Lab

The Drone Lab is a complete, ready-to-use indoor laboratory setup for research and education in multi-agent systems, flight robotics, flight control, and aerospace control. It is an open and customizable platform that combines lightweight and robust drones, open-source software, and a highly accurate motion capture system to measure drone positions. This setup allows for the implementation and validation of concepts related to guidance, navigation, and control of UAVs in a safe and repeatable indoor laboratory environment. Integration with MATLAB and Simulink enables customizing the control system and interacting with the drone from MATLAB.

• Development: Implement custom controllers in Simulink and automatically generate and integrate code with the drone firmware. 
• Simulation: Validate and test controllers in a simulation environment that mirrors real-world conditions.
• Flight test: Easily deploy custom controllers to the drone and repeatably conduct flight tests in a safe environment.

The ANT-X educational drones are designed for students and researchers to enable the transition from theory to practice of advanced design methods for guidance, navigation, and control systems. This enriches the experience in flight robotics and UAV control through hands-on experimental activities. Involving students in experimental laboratory sessions enhances engagement, motivation, and comprehension: it provides the possibility to transition from theory to practice, working with real drones.

Typical end users are:

• Students who can benefit from the ready-to-use ANT-X platforms, enabling them to gain hands-on experience with real hardware and transition from theory to practice.
• Teachers/lecturers who can leverage ready-for-use educational material provided by ANT-X to prepare educational laboratory experiences for students.
• Researchers who can implement, test, and experimentally validate new ideas and algorithms in drone guidance, navigation, and control, generating added value to their research.

The Drone Lab is integrated with MATLAB and Simulink through two proprietary software tools developed by ANT-X:

• The automatic controller code generation tool (SLXtoPX4) is an ensemble of MATLAB scripts, a GUI, a Simulink project template, and Simulink models. Users implement customized controllers within the Simulink models and then generate firmware controller code through the GUI, which uses Embedded Coder^®.
• The drone command MATLAB API (DroneCmd) is a set of MATLAB handle classes; the user interfaces to these classes by calling methods from the command line. Once connection with the drone is established, the user can get telemetry data from the drone to the MATLAB workspace and send commands to the drone from the MATLAB command line. Its functionalities are based on the ROS Toolbox and the ROS custom message support add-on.

For more information, visit the ANT-X DroneLab product page.