PteroSim

UAV Simulation platform
_{PX4 & ArduPilot SITL · Programmable API · Multi-vehicle support}

Watch Demo · Website · Download · Quick Start · Contact

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About

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.

Features

• 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

Vehicles

Quadcopter PX4 · ArduPilot · Betaflight	Helicopter PX4 · ArduPilot
VTOL PX4 · ArduPilot	Coaxial Helicopter ArduPilot
Fixed-Wing PX4 · ArduPilot	Tailsitter PX4 · ArduPilot

Add your own aircraft

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.

Getting Started

Download the latest release for your platform from GitHub Releases, extract, and launch PteroSim. See the documentation for setup guides and API reference.

System Requirements

	Minimum	Recommended
OS	Windows 10 64-bit / Ubuntu 22.04	Windows 11 / Ubuntu 24.04
CPU	Quad-core, 2.5 GHz	6+ cores, 3.0+ GHz
RAM	8 GB	16 GB
GPU	GTX 770 / RX 570	RTX 2070+ / RX 5700+
Storage	5 GB	10 GB SSD

Documentation

Full documentation at pterosimdocs.readthedocs.io.

• Getting Started
• First Steps
• SITL Simulation with PX4
• SITL Simulation with ArduPilot
• Python API Reference

API Examples

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.

License

PteroSim is proprietary software by PteroLabs AI.
Free for non-commercial, personal, and academic use. See LICENSE for details.

Third-party software

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

Reporting Issues

Bugs and feature requests: issue tracker. Commercial support: [email protected].

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_{© 2026 PteroLabs AI}