0004 - Skip Uncrew Simulators — Traffic Service Generates Telemetry

Andi Lamprecht ·2026-05-11· 1 min read· Draft

Decision

Uncrew simulators (Avatar, Virtual Sky) will not be used for the ATOMx demo. The Traffic Service will generate drone telemetry directly based on configured drone roles and flight plans.

Context

The ATOMx demo needs simulated drone traffic with configurable trust levels. Existing Uncrew simulators (Avatar nodes, Auterion/Virtual Sky) are:

• Dependent on Kubernetes infrastructure
• Unreliable for demo scenarios (team experience)
• Overkill — no pilot flying experience is needed
• Not configurable for trust-level attributes (crypto identity, remote ID spoofing)

Instead, the Traffic Service will host a lightweight simulation engine where each drone is a data structure with a role (unknown, declared, weakly verified, strongly verified) that determines its telemetry behavior and identity attributes.

On “start mission,” Mission Service sends the flight plan to Traffic Service, which begins generating telemetry for that drone along the plan.

Consequences

• Mission Service “start mission” rewired to call Traffic Service instead of Avatar
• No dependency on Kubernetes or Auterion for the demo
• Demo is fully runnable via Docker Compose locally
• Drone behavior is deterministic and configurable — critical for repeatable demos
• Virtual Sky / Avatar remain available for Uncrew production use (no changes to existing flow)