UAV & Drone Simulation Development

A UAV program lives or dies on what the operator sees. The sensor feed, the moving map, and the aircraft's own state have to be correlated and drawn in real time, on the ground station and inside the simulator that trained the crew before they ever flew the vehicle. We build that software.

Fixed-wing and rotary visual simulation

We build and integrate visual simulation for fixed-wing and rotary UAVs: a flight model driving a correlated out-the-window scene and sensor view, over the same terrain the real vehicle flies. That means visual simulation plumbing done properly, DIS and IEEE-1278.1 interoperability where a UAV shares a synthetic battlespace with other players, and terrain that matches across every station.

Sensor and payload views

The interesting view is rarely the cockpit. It is the gimballed EO/IR camera, the footprint on the ground, the synthetic overlay that tells the operator what they are looking at. We build simulated payload cameras and the sensor overlays that ride on top of them, drawing on our computer vision and XR work.

Ground-control station displays

Operator displays need a moving map, sensor overlay, telemetry, and mission tasking, all on correlated terrain. We build those on osgEarth, the same whole-earth engine behind our defense and space work, so the map the operator trusts is the map the simulator used.

Where it connects

UAV work draws the whole toolbox together: visual simulation, geospatial terrain, GPS-denied and vision-based navigation for when the link or the signal drops, and the safety-critical discipline avionics demand.

Who works on it

AlphaPixel is a US-owned small business, founded in 2004, with senior developers who have built flight models, sensor simulation, and correlated terrain for crewed and uncrewed platforms. DLA DD2345 / ITAR registered. We take closed-source defense work and open source alike.