The lab was created in the early 1930s by Charles Stark Draper at MIT as the Instrumentation Lab. It was renamed for its founder in 1970 and separated from MIT in 1973 to become an independent, non-profit organization. Draper's expertise includes the areas of guidance, navigation, and control technologies and systems; fault-tolerant computing; advanced algorithms and software solutions; modeling and simulation; and MEMS and multichip module technology.