The crest is a map — hover any of the five emblems
AISoftware & intelligent systems
ROBOTICSLearning + physical machines
LIFE SUPPORTClosed-loop biological systems
SPACELunar & Mars habitat research
DROM Research works across software, robotics, controlled-environment agriculture and life-support engineering. The common idea is simple: take limited resources, close the loop, automate what can be automated, and make advanced capabilities reach people who are currently priced out of them.
DROM RESEARCH LTD is an early-stage research and technology company registered in England & Wales. It was founded by a civil engineer who retrained into software and AI — someone who has built in the physical world and now builds in the digital one, and who knows exactly how much capability sits behind a door most people are never handed the key to. That is the whole reason the company exists. We build end-to-end computational systems independently — from research and software through to physical prototypes.
We design, build and document working prototypes in fields that normally stay locked behind expensive laboratories — and then we hand the knowledge to people who could never afford the door fee. What starts as a prototype on a kitchen table can become a subsystem for an extreme environment.
The domains may change — software, machines, biology or extraterrestrial habitats — but the objective does not. We are equipping a new kind of person: one who can build, grow, repair and survive — in a city, on a field, in a closed habitat, or somewhere no one has lived yet.
The clearest example of that is already live. RoboSchool is a browser lab holding fifteen real robots, each an open project with its own licence — humanoids, arms, drones, ground vehicles and quadrupeds. Every machine starts dead. You bring it to life one driver at a time, then command it in plain English while the actual Python writes itself beside the motion, and any word in that code will explain itself if you tap it.
Nobody needs a laboratory, a robot, or prior programming to begin. That is the whole argument of this company, running in a browser: the barrier was never talent. It was access.
“Use what you have. Find a way.”
RoboSchool is a browser-based lab where anyone can build and command a real robot without owning one. You pick a machine, assemble it driver by driver, and give it orders in plain English — no lab, no degree, free to start.
Fifteen real projects, each with its own licence, in five families: humanoids, robotic arms, drones, ground vehicles and quadrupeds. Every one of them is a real project with a real licence — InMoov, SO-101, OpenArm 2.0, AR4-MK5, Crazyflie, PX4, ArduPilot, Donkey Car, Duckietown, Stanford Pupper and others. Nothing invented, nothing simulated for show.
The machine starts dead. Nothing moves until you install what it needs — power, servos, gyro, vision, grip, the brain. Ask a drone to take off before its GPS is in and it refuses, and tells you exactly which part is missing. That refusal is the lesson: you learn what each component is for by being stopped without it.
Then the code writes itself. Say “wave” and the arm moves while real Python appears line by line beside it — def wave(): arm.raise(60) — with a mechanics panel naming the actual servo doing the work. Tap any word in the code — def, return, for, the colon — and it explains itself. Nobody has to already know Python to start.
It is grounded in real open projects, each with its own licence, so what is learned on screen maps onto a machine the learner can physically build.
Open live demo →Four documented prototypes, from the simplest thing you could build this month to a wearable pack where plants regenerate the air you breathe.
The first thing we built, and the one that already works on Earth. NFT channels for lettuce, basil and green onions, with dedicated deep-media pots for carrots, which need real root depth. Nutrient solution recirculates from a central reservoir through filtration and separate distribution circuits, with drip irrigation for the root crops. LED lighting, environmental sensors, ventilation and pH/EC monitoring hold the conditions steady.
Nothing about it is exotic — that is the point. It is buildable now, in a garage or a classroom, on a fraction of the water a field would need.
This one descends from the hydroponic “tomato tree” shown at Expo ’85 in Tsukuba, Japan. Using the Hyponica method developed by the agronomist Shigeo Nozawa, a single tomato seed — no soil, nothing but air and water — became a plant several metres wide that yielded more than 13,000 tomatoes over the six-month fair.
Ours grows a single grafted tomato–potato plant in a sealed cabinet: tomatoes ripen above the graft union, potato tubers form below it in a deep aerated root chamber. Its defining feature is light drawn from the sun itself — a two-axis tracker and a “Himawari” collector gather daylight and pipe it indoors through six quartz optical-fibre bundles, so the plant grows on real daylight rather than lamps. A daily UV-C cycle keeps the solution and air path clean.
BIOPACK is an original DROM RESEARCH LTD concept exploring how living plants could contribute to atmospheric regeneration in a portable, closed system. Built into a wearable pack (380 × 260 × 560 mm, ~8.5 kg empty), it integrates a transparent plant chamber, hydroponic nutrient circulation, controlled illumination, air filtration and real-time monitoring of O₂, CO₂, temperature and humidity.
Unlike an oxygen cylinder, BIOPACK investigates biological regeneration: the plants become part of a continuously monitored air loop — backed by HEPA and activated-carbon filtration, a CO₂ scrubber, an oxygen buffer and an emergency O₂ cartridge for safety. Two documentation revisions are shown below.
A research and demonstration prototype — not a certified medical or human life-support device.
A five-person lunar / Mars research habitat: seventeen pressurised spaces, all pre-fabricated, connected through ten standard airlocks and two junctions — a hub corridor that carries the traffic, and a decontamination room that every route from the dirty side has to pass through. Crew waste feeds water recovery; recovered water feeds the greenhouse; the greenhouse returns oxygen and food to the crew.
You do not build a habitat on the Moon. You bring one. Every module leaves Earth finished. What you cannot bring is the second one — so the first one starts collecting. Material comes in, and the robotic facility, built to the same 12 × 6 × 4 m envelope as Lab 2 so it ships the way every other module ships, crushes it, sieves it and 3D-prints it into structural elements at 25–60 MPa. Its own frame is anodised aluminium 6061-T6 with UV-stabilised polycarbonate panels. From there the base stops being cargo and becomes a factory.
Both junctions are aluminium and steel — the hub corridor and the decontamination room, the two spaces everything else connects through. Same for the laboratories, the sleeping quarters, the garage, storage and energy. Composite and steel is used on the ten standard airlocks and the EVA airlock, the two toilets, the contamination room and the common area.
Operating envelope (DWG 08 Rev. F) — pressure 70–120 kPa · O₂ 19.5–23.0 % · CO₂ below 1000 ppm · relative humidity 30–60 % · temperature 18–24 °C. Every life-support system is duplicated (N+1).
A 7.2 × 3.6 × 2.4 m closed-loop food system for five crew, combining horizontal NFT racks for leafy greens and herbs, a deep-media bed for root crops, a Pomato unit — the same grafted tomato–potato concept as our terrestrial cabinet — and a cultured-protein module with a 3D food printer. Daylight is captured by a roof collector and delivered through optical fibre, supplemented by LED bars, with CO₂ enrichment from the habitat atmosphere.
Closed-loop recovery of water from wastewater, humidity condensate and urine, plus oxygen production by electrolysis. CO₂ from the habitat is processed in a Sabatier reactor to recover additional water, with methane as a by-product. The module supplies potable water, technical water and oxygen to both the habitat and the greenhouse through a universal docking interface.
The habitat’s workshop: an ergonomic workbench with tool management, two seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arms with force feedback and collision avoidance, a 3D printer for plastic and metal, an electronics test bench, and environmental control with fume extraction — the point at which our robotics work and our habitat work meet.
An autonomous industrial complex that turns local regolith into structural building elements — reception, crushing, sieving, binder mixing, extrusion and 3D printing, curing, automated quality control and robotic assembly. Designed for minimal human intervention: 10–20 m³ of regolith processed daily into 120–200 building elements, with over 72 hours of unmanned autonomy. This is how a habitat stops being cargo and starts being architecture built from what is already there.
The habitat is a network, not a set of rooms. Resources move between modules in a controlled loop.
12.00 × 6.00 × 4.00 m — primary scientific workspace.
2.40 × 1.20 × 2.20 m — dedicated technical bay.
2.40 × 1.20 × 2.20 m — dedicated technical bay.
2.40 × 1.20 × 2.20 m — electrolysis, filtration and resource processing.
7.00 × 5.00 × 3.50 m — cooking, dining and lounge.
7.20 × 3.60 × 2.40 m — food production and the biological loop.
7.00 × 4.00 × 3.00 m — five individual berths.
4.00 × 4.00 × 3.50 m — controlled transition between habitat and exterior.
2.00 × 1.60 × 3.00 m — links decontamination to the crew quarters.
7.00 × 4.00 × 3.50 m — surface vehicle bay.
4.00 × 3.00 × 2.50 m — solar, battery and fuel-cell backup.
3.00 × 2.50 × 2.50 m — logistics and waste handling.
2.50 × 2.00 × 3.50 m — sanitation.
2.50 × 2.00 × 3.50 m — sanitation.
2.50 × 2.50 × 2.50 m — exterior access for surface missions.
2.00 × 2.00 × 2.50 m — fourteen units. Pressure isolation and dust containment between every connected module.
The workstation & robotics module and the regolith construction facility are documented above as separate units of the same programme; they do not appear on this revision of the habitat drawing.
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