Maestro ships with a full in-browser Simulator that runs the same orchestrator, Maestro AI, and Safety Gate the live ground station uses, fed by a physics model instead of live MAVLink telemetry. It serves two operational purposes: a prospect showcase in a few minutes, or a real-time dry-run rehearsal for operators preparing a live mission.

One runtime, two jobs

The Simulator compresses or stretches a scenario to fit the operator's intent. Same code path as a live deployment, same decision logic, same state machine, the only variable is how fast the sim clock runs relative to wall-clock time.

Showcase. A prospect loads demo.adrone.company and watches a 24-hour Curacao fleet patrol play out in roughly 14 minutes. Every relay handoff, GPS dropout, weather abort, and detection alert fires as it would in a live deployment, just time-compressed.

Dry run. An operator configures tomorrow's actual patrol, route, fleet size, battery type, schedule, and watches it play out in real time before the drone leaves the ground. The airspace-deconfliction community calls this a dry run; the PX4 ecosystem calls it SITL. The principle is the same: a rehearsal at real pacing, useful for catching misconfigurations that only become visible in motion.

Same Simulator, same runtime, the speed selector decides which job it's doing right now.

Speed controls

The Simulator's top bar carries a five-position speed selector beside the mode toggle:

  • 1×, real time, 1:1 with drone flight. An 8-hour patrol takes 8 hours. Dry-run mode: configure your patrol, start it, let the laptop run in the background while you work through a pre-flight checklist and watch relay cycles trigger at the real cadence.
  • 10×, fast-forward rehearsal. 8 hours in 48 minutes. Pattern matters more than pacing; you want to see three or four full relay cycles without waiting.
  • 50×, mid-length preview. 8 hours in ~10 minutes. Good for tabletop reviews with a team gathered around a laptop.
  • 100×, compressed showcase (default). 24 hours in ~14 minutes.
  • 200×, extra-fast scan. 24 hours in 7 minutes. Useful for reviewing a multi-day patrol when you just want to see the pattern hold over many cycles.

Speed maps directly to the orchestrator's speedFactor, every 200 ms real-tick advances simulated time by that factor. Detection events, handoff timing, battery drain, and GPS state machines all compress proportionally. At 1× the drone moves across the map at 6 m/s real-world. At 200× it sweeps a 20 km patrol route in about a minute.

How it's wired

When the Simulator is active, the drone uploader switches to a physics-backed stub and the orchestrator tick loop reads position, battery, and GPS state from the simulator instead of a live MAVLink bridge. Everything downstream, the Maestro AI closed-loop decision cycle, Safety Gate enforcement, detection pipeline, alert engine, patrol scheduler, external notifications, runs untouched. A simulated patrol produces the same decisions, alerts, and audit logs as a real one; only the telemetry source differs.

That's intentional. It's what makes the Simulator useful as a rehearsal tool rather than a toy. If a weather-triggered abort fires in simulation, the same code path would have fired in a real flight. If the Maestro AI recommends reducing swap threshold from 20% to 18% at 7 m/s wind, that's the recommendation it would have made against live drones. There is no separate "simulator logic" anywhere in the stack.

Try it

Launch the Simulator →

No install, no login. When the page loads, a three-drone fleet patrols the Curacao coastline at 100× by default, so the 24-hour scenario plays out in a few minutes. A few things to try:

  • Click 1× to watch a relay handoff at real pacing. The standby drone pre-launches and transits to the handoff waypoint in real time, instructive for understanding why the default swap threshold is 20%.
  • Change Number of Drones to 1. The UI shifts to Single-Drone SAR Mode; draw a polygon anywhere on the map, click Run Demo, and watch the boustrophedon grid search play out.
  • Draw your own patrol route near your home coastline. Set fleet size, pick a battery type, click Run Demo. The Simulator anchors on your drawn shape rather than panning to Curacao.
  • Set a 2-hour Patrol Schedule and run at 10×, a 12-minute rehearsal that includes a couple of complete relay cycles.

The Maestro AI (LOCAL / CLOUD source badge in the top-right of the fleet panel) is on by default, so every recommendation is logged with a full audit trail. In the public browser Simulator, only the local decision engine runs. In the Electron desktop app with API keys configured, the cloud-refinement path (Anthropic → OpenAI → Gemini) activates when connectivity exists.

What's next

Two expansion points on the backlog, both building on the same runtime:

Mission replay. Record-and-replay of real flights, not simulated ones. Same UI, same controls, but drone positions come from a MAVLink log rather than the physics model. Useful for debriefs, training new operators, and documenting incidents.

Training mode. Record a simulator session as a structured scenario, fleet size, route, weather, scripted failures, and replay it for operator drill. A supervisor could script a specific failure (handoff miss, wind exceedance, GPS loss) and have the trainee respond repeatedly until the response is automatic.

For now: one Simulator, two jobs, five speeds. Try it.