🏛 Vertical Innovation.
College and professional drone programs: research, industry applications, and advanced autonomy.
Vertical Innovation is the top of the flight path. Students and professionals run applied research and capstones and ship domain applications (inspection, survey, delivery) on the research-scale DEXI-10, with clear pathways into UAS careers.
Research-grade autonomy.
Vertical Innovation is where the curriculum meets the field. Programs run applied research, build multi-drone systems, and ship real domain applications on an open PX4 / ROS 2 platform with nothing locked down, the same stack used in university labs.
Applied research & capstones
Open-ended research projects and capstone work on a real, open platform, the foundation for original autonomy work.
Advanced autonomy
Multi-drone coordination and custom autonomy, the next frontier above single-vehicle missions.
Domain applications
Real-world missions (inspection, survey, and delivery) that put drone autonomy to work in industry.
Career pathways
Clear routes into UAS technician, autonomy engineer, and embedded-systems roles, a CTE-aligned bridge to industry.
Not a step.
A toolkit.
Ground School, Hover Lab and Flight Deck are a progression a student climbs. Vertical Innovation is a different kind of thing. It is where sophisticated organizations (universities, research labs, large corporations) pick up DroneBlocks as a toolkit and point it at problems and opportunities of their own. There is no grade band and no course to finish. You arrive with a question.
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
Those three are a progression a student climbs. This is not the fourth. An organization arrives here with a problem of its own and uses the open PX4 / ROS 2 platform, the DEXI airframes and the curriculum as a toolkit to attack it. A student can come up through the levels, or a research team can start here on day one.
It runs on the DEXI platform.
Vertical Innovation runs on the whole DEXI platform, DEXI-3 through DEXI-10, because applied research rarely uses one airframe. A classroom study wants a dozen small aircraft. A payload trial wants the research-scale DEXI-10. One codebase, one toolchain, every size of aircraft the work calls for.
DEXI-10 · research-scale platform
A larger open PX4 / ROS 2 airframe for multi-drone coordination, custom autonomy, and the domain applications industry teams build.
Built for the field
More airframe, more payload, more endurance: the headroom for inspection, survey, and delivery missions in the real world.
Same code. Browser to DEXI.
The same PX4 firmware that flies the real DEXI-10 runs in the browser simulator. Research missions can be modeled, tested, and validated in the sim before they ever leave the lab.
The simulator isn’t a separate toy environment, it’s the same open flight stack the hardware runs. That continuity is what carries a student from a Ground School block mission all the way to a field-deployed research aircraft: code you test is code you fly.
Not a demo. Deployed.
Built for Vertical Innovation.
Part of 60+ courses and 800+ video lessons across the DroneBlocks platform. The full Vertical Innovation course catalog is coming soon, here’s a taste of what’s inside.
Applied Research Capstone
An open-ended research track on the DEXI-10, define a problem, build the autonomy, fly the result.
Multi-Drone Systems
Distributed autonomy research on an open PX4 / ROS 2 platform.
Industry Applications
Inspection, survey, and delivery missions, and the UAS career pathways they open.
Full course catalog coming soon.