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ARGUS User Manual

Detection simulator

The Detection simulator isn’t a “fake YOLO”-type tool — it’s a drone flight simulator that drives synthetic telemetry + detection events along a polygon-based coverage pattern. Used for training, demos, and E2E testing the detection / alert / flag pipelines without flying real aircraft.

What it produces

PolygonSimService publishes a PolygonSimState signal per simulated drone:

  • Position — lat / lng (WGS-84).
  • Altitude — AGL in metres.
  • Heading — degrees.
  • Gimbal pitch — negative = pointed down (−90 = straight-down / nadir).
  • Gimbal yaw — relative to the aircraft heading.
  • Speed — m/s.

The simulator drives these values along the SAR polygon coverage grid, so the drone appears to lawnmower the area.

How you start one

The simulator is triggered from the map tile’s SAR polygon context — not from a toggle in the settings drawer or the streams tile. Steps:

  1. Draw a polygon of type SAR on the map.
  2. Right-click the polygon → Start simulation (when the option is available — typically gated on having an SAR-type polygon in scope).
  3. A synthetic drone spawns and starts flying the polygon’s coverage grid.
  4. The drone-stream tile’s HUD and the map overlay pick up the simulated drone’s state automatically — it renders as a regular drone entity with live position updates.

What downstream consumers see

The simulator wires into the same systems real drones use:

  • Map tile — the simulated drone shows up as a regular drone entity with position, heading, and a trail.
  • Fleet tile — the drone appears in the roster like any other aircraft.
  • Drone stream tile HUD — attitude / altitude / heading values from the simulator feed the HUD the same way a real drone’s telemetry would.
  • Sensor fusion coverage grid — if sensor fusion is enabled, covered cells fill in as the simulated drone “flies” over them.
  • Detection simulation (if configured on the polygon) — synthetic detections can be scripted to fire at specific waypoints.

Use cases

  • SAR training — run a new operator through a full coverage mission with alerts, flags, and after-action review — all without aircraft.
  • Demos + sales — show the entire operational flow to a stakeholder without field logistics.
  • E2E testing of watchlists, workflows, alerts — simulator drives scripted detections that fire real alert flows.
  • Post-op validation — re-run a real mission’s polygon to check that a planned grid would have caught the target.

What it’s NOT

  • Not a browser-side YOLO runner. There’s no client-side YOLO. The simulator fires scripted detection events, not live inference.
  • Not video synthesis. The simulated drone doesn’t produce a video stream — the drone-stream tile shows a placeholder or the last-known frame.
  • Not a general-purpose drone simulator. It’s polygon-coverage-driven; you can’t fly the sim-drone manually.

Stopping a simulation

Right-click the polygon → Stop simulation. The sim-drone is de-registered from the fleet and removed from the map.