Simulator
Simulator
Fly without a drone — what a session is, how missions are scored, and what the flight model does and does not reproduce.
Every student gets their own drone, in their own browser tab, on UAVProg’s machines. Nothing is installed, nothing is shared, and nothing breaks when they fly into a wall.
The flight model underneath is not a cartoon. It is a rigid-body physics simulation: real mass, per-rotor thrust that takes time to spool up, aerodynamic drag, wind as an actual force, air that thins with altitude, and a battery that sags as it empties. A program that flies badly here flies badly because the physics disagreed with it, not because a script decided to fail it.
That is worth saying precisely, because the opposite claim is tempting and wrong: a clean flight in the simulator is not a promise about a real aircraft. The model is tuned to teach, not to predict a specific airframe, and some of what makes outdoor flying hard is deliberately not in it. What the simulator models is the honest list — read it before you tell a class that the simulator “is” the drone.
In this section
Your first flight
Launch a session, take off, move, and land — the four things every later lesson builds on.
Missions and scoring
What a mission asks for, how the score is built, what the time limit does, and what "best score" means after a retry.
What a session is
The three programs behind every flight, why the first launch of the day is slow, and what to do when one will not start.
What the simulator models
What the flight model reproduces, what it leaves out, and what a clean simulator flight does and does not tell you about a real drone.