swarm-house/simulator

Virtual drone fleet

A data generator that exercises the exact on-board pipeline described in 03 — Data platform: 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

# 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

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

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