[krisoft]

> Essentially if you're running vicon you can make flying things do things like you could make them do programming them in Blender or similar

It is not quite that easy though. Yes having an external tracker will give you a reliable, high quality source of position and orientation.

But that does not mean that you can “program them in Blender”. You still need to figure out what kind of trajectories your system can or can’t follow and how to map from position and orientation errors to actuation outputs.

If you can’t control the robot with external tracking then you have no hope of controlling it with internal state estimation, so if you already have the test facilities it makes sense to start with that. That way you are not debuging two crappy subsystems depending on each other and failing spectacularly.