> without an array of camera systems in some indoor environment, drone research is a non-starter right?
No, that is not right. For practical reasons many people working on control algorithms for multicopters do use facilities like you describe.
The indoor nature helps managing risk to third parties and decouples your experiments from the weather. Many experiments are helped by an external ground truth localisation data, and camera based systems are relatively cheap and relatively simple way to achieve that.
That doesn’t mean that multicopter flight control is the only thing worth researching about drones. Nor does it mean that every possible experiment requires a sub-centimeter external pose tracking solution.
No, that is not right. For practical reasons many people working on control algorithms for multicopters do use facilities like you describe.
The indoor nature helps managing risk to third parties and decouples your experiments from the weather. Many experiments are helped by an external ground truth localisation data, and camera based systems are relatively cheap and relatively simple way to achieve that.
That doesn’t mean that multicopter flight control is the only thing worth researching about drones. Nor does it mean that every possible experiment requires a sub-centimeter external pose tracking solution.