🚀 Flight Deck.
Advanced drone programming, autonomous flight, and field missions.
Flight Deck is where students stop flying and start building autonomy. They write ROS 2 and C++, run computer vision with AprilTag and YOLO, and fly autonomous missions indoors and outdoors on optical flow, on a real, open, research-grade DEXI-5.
Autonomy on the stack industry ships.
Flight Deck students write the same ROS 2, C++, and computer-vision code that ships in commercial drones, not toy versions. They finish the term flying autonomous missions outdoors on a DEXI‑5. Aligned to CSTA and NGSS.
ROS 2 and C++
Students write ROS 2 nodes and production-grade C++, the exact middleware and language professional autonomy teams use.
Computer vision (AprilTag + YOLO)
Onboard CV pipelines for detection and tracking: precision landing, follow-the-tag, and AI-vision missions on real hardware.
Autonomous missions, indoors and out
The same autonomous mission runs indoors and outdoors on optical flow, no rewrite. GPS waypoint missions arrive with our add-on, coming soon.
Field projects
Capstone-style missions that put autonomy to work, the bridge from classroom code to professional UAS engineering.
Autonomy, not remote control.
Flight Deck is asynchronous Python and ROS 2 against a live flight stack: telemetry streams, offboard control, computer vision, and the failure handling that separates a demo from a mission.
asyncio.gather, on a timeout, against a live vehicle.
The autonomy step
on the flight path.
Flight Deck is Level 3, the step above Hover Lab, where Python becomes ROS 2 and indoor flight becomes outdoor autonomy. Every capability stays on as they climb, on the same code and curriculum spine.
Ground School
Block coding and simulator missions. K–5, no drone required.
Hover Lab
Python and indoor flight. Adds DEXI‑3.
Flight Deck
ROS 2, C++, and computer vision. Adds DEXI‑5 and DEXI‑10.
Vertical Innovation
Applied research and industry applications on the full DEXI platform.
Everything a Flight Deck student learns carries up the flight path on the same open platform, ROS 2 and C++ become the foundation for applied research.
DEXI‑5 and DEXI‑10 join the fleet.
Flight Deck introduces the DEXI-5, an Official PX4 Developer Kit, and opens up the DEXI-10 alongside it. Every unit ships as a full developer kit with a Linux companion computer, camera, onboard vision, and the open DEXI OS, flying on optical flow indoors and out. A Flight Deck classroom flies all three: DEXI-3 indoors, DEXI-5 for autonomy, DEXI-10 when the payload or the field demands it.
DEXI-5 · the autonomy platform
An open, research-grade drone running a full ROS 2 stack with onboard computer vision, the same platform university labs build on.
Indoor and outdoor
Optical flow holds it steady indoors with no GPS; a GPS module takes it outside for real autonomous waypoint missions, the same code in both settings.
Same code. Browser to DEXI.
The same PX4 firmware that flies the real DEXI-5 runs in the browser simulator. The ROS 2 mission a Flight Deck student writes in the sim is the exact code that flies the drone, one line of config different.
The simulator isn’t a separate toy environment, it’s the same flight stack the hardware runs. That promise is what lets a Flight Deck class start coding the day a teacher buys it, weeks before the drone arrives: code you test is code you fly.
Built for Flight Deck.
Part of 60+ courses and 800+ video lessons across the DroneBlocks platform. The full Flight Deck course catalog is coming soon, here’s a taste of what’s inside.
ROS 2 Foundations
Nodes, topics, services, and offboard control, the robotics middleware behind autonomous flight.
Computer Vision in Flight
AprilTag tracking and YOLO object detection running onboard, precision landing and AI-vision missions.
Outdoor Autonomous Missions
outdoor optical-flow missions and capstone projects on the DEXI-5.
Full course catalog coming soon.
Where the code gets tested.
Teams fly this aircraft at the Advanced Vertical Robotics Competition: an autonomous course, a payload, and a clock. The curriculum on this site is what gets a team ready for it.