# Virtual drone fleet A data generator that exercises the **exact on-board pipeline** described in [03 — Data platform](../docs/03-data-platform.md): seeded kinematics along a patrol route, sensor streams at realistic rates, detection events, the hot `current/` → sealed Parquet write path, and the compact UDP state broadcast between drones. One process = one drone. Scaling the swarm is a Compose flag. ## Run a swarm ```bash # 5 drones (default), 2-minute flight, shared flight id FLIGHT_ID=$(date -u +%Y%m%dT%H%MZ)-sim docker compose up --build --scale drone=5 # 10 drones, 5-minute flight, 4x accelerated DRONE_COUNT=10 DURATION_S=300 SPEEDUP=4 docker compose up --build --scale drone=10 ``` Output lands in `./data/` with the standard layout: ``` data/dataset=telemetry/flight=…/drone=…/sensor=imu/year=…/…/hour=…/data.parquet data/dataset=detections/flight=…/drone=…/… data/dataset=state/flight=…/drone=…/… ← sent + received broadcasts ``` ## Run a single drone without Docker ```bash pip install -r requirements.txt DRONE_ID=dr-01 DURATION_S=30 SPEEDUP=10 DATA_DIR=./data python -m virtual_drone.main ``` ## Query the results ```bash python - <<'EOF' import duckdb con = duckdb.connect() print(con.sql(""" SELECT drone, sensor, count(*) AS rows, to_timestamp(min(ts_ns)/1e9) AS first_row, to_timestamp(max(ts_ns)/1e9) AS last_row FROM read_parquet('data/dataset=telemetry/**/*.parquet', hive_partitioning=true) GROUP BY drone, sensor ORDER BY drone, sensor """)) print(con.sql(""" SELECT drone, direction, count(*) AS frames, count(DISTINCT peer_id) AS peers FROM read_parquet('data/dataset=state/**/*.parquet', hive_partitioning=true) GROUP BY drone, direction ORDER BY drone, direction """)) EOF ``` ## Reproducibility Every run is deterministic per `(SEED, DRONE_ID)`: same route jitter, same sensor noise, same detection sequence. A bug report is a seed and a config, not a description. ## Knobs | Env | Default | Meaning | | --- | --- | --- | | `DRONE_ID` | derived from hostname | Unique per container automatically under `--scale` | | `FLIGHT_ID` | generated | Set explicitly so all drones share one flight partition | | `SEED` | `42` | Determinism root | | `DURATION_S` | `120` | Simulated flight length | | `SPEEDUP` | `1.0` | Wall-clock acceleration | | `IMU_HZ` | `50` | High-rate sensor load | | `STATE_HZ` | `5` | Broadcast frequency | | `AREA_SIZE_M` | `400` | Patrol square side |