You can make a surprising amount of progress in simulation, before being committing to hardware. For example, check out the tutorials on this page for bringing up the Hector quadrotor in Gazebo:
If you're interested in planar SLAM, exploration etc, there are loads of simulated and real platforms to experiment with, and lots of ready-to-go scenarios which you can bring up, observe, play with, etc. For example:
http://wiki.ros.org/hector_quadrotor
If you're interested in planar SLAM, exploration etc, there are loads of simulated and real platforms to experiment with, and lots of ready-to-go scenarios which you can bring up, observe, play with, etc. For example:
http://wiki.ros.org/frontier_exploration#Functionality