UAV Simulation platform
PX4 & ArduPilot SITL · Programmable API · Multi-vehicle support
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PteroSim is a UAV simulation platform for drone development, testing, and research. Accurate 6-DOF flight dynamics, native PX4 and ArduPilot SITL support, and a full programmatic API.
- 6-DOF flight dynamics, up to 10x real-time
- Wind and turbulence modeling
- PX4 and ArduPilot SITL
- IMU, GPS, barometer, airspeed, camera
- Aircraft defined in JSBSim XML, so you can add your own
- Programmatic gRPC API for multi-drone orchestration
- Python SDK:
pip install pterosim
 Quadcopter PX4 · ArduPilot · Betaflight |
 Helicopter PX4 · ArduPilot |
 VTOL PX4 · ArduPilot |
 Coaxial Helicopter ArduPilot |
 Fixed-Wing PX4 · ArduPilot |
 Tailsitter PX4 · ArduPilot |
The aircraft above are not compiled into the simulator. Each one is a folder of JSBSim XML and glTF meshes, shipped loose in PteroSimAircrafts/ inside the release, so you can copy one and edit it into your own. You can do this on any license tier, Free included.
Examples to copy from: PteroSimAircrafts.
Download the latest release for your platform from GitHub Releases, extract, and launch PteroSim. See the documentation for setup guides and API reference.
Full documentation at pterosimdocs.readthedocs.io.
- Getting Started
- First Steps
- SITL Simulation with PX4
- SITL Simulation with ArduPilot
- Python API Reference
Example scripts and clients live in PteroSimScripts: environment setup, installing the pterosim package, and running your first script against a live simulator.
See the Python API reference for the full API surface.
PteroSim is proprietary software by PteroLabs AI.
Free for non-commercial, personal, and academic use. See LICENSE for details.
Flight dynamics are computed by JSBSim (LGPL-2.1), shipped as a separate shared library. Source code including PteroLabs AI's modifications: PteroLabsAI/jsbsim.
Camera video streams are encoded by FFmpeg (LGPL-3.0), shipped as a separate executable built without any GPL component, from the FFmpeg release/8.1 branch with the BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds toolchain. It carries the OpenH264 codec, Copyright (c) 2013 Cisco Systems, Inc. (BSD 2-Clause). ffmpeg -version prints the configuration the shipped binary was built with.
Full license texts, the build configuration, and the notices for every library linked into that executable: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.txt.
If you use PteroSim in academic work, please also cite JSBSim: Berndt, J. S., Coconnier, B., De Marco, A., & McLeod, S. (2026). JSBSim, An Open Source Flight Dynamics Software Library. Journal of Open Source Software, 11(126), 11129. doi:10.21105/joss.11129
Bugs and feature requests: issue tracker. Commercial support: info@pterolabs.ai.
© 2026 PteroLabs AI