SADE-SIM at FSE 2026

This July, CCL lab member Lax traveled to Montreal, Canada for FSE 2026, the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, to present our paper SADE-SIM: A Scalable Simulation Platform for Validating City-Scale Multi-sUAS Missions.

SADE-SIM is a hybrid simulation framework that pairs physical accuracy with photorealistic visualization to support large multi-sUAS deployments at city scale. It’s built to close a gap in existing tools, which typically handle only a handful of concurrent vehicles and fall short on the fidelity needed to evaluate vision-based navigation, sensor degradation in urban environments, and compliance with evolving airspace regulations. The platform brings together web-based mission planning, real-time control compatible with standard protocols, live video stream visualization, and archival review of flight data.

To show what the system can do, Lax presented a case study built around a 32-sUAS heterogeneous fleet flying diverse mission profiles through a restricted airspace zone, where vehicles dynamically request entry and the system evaluates mission-critical safety parameters before granting access.

Between sessions, Lax followed the conference program, catching keynotes, technical tracks, and plenty of hallway conversations along the way. FSE still has that familiar, vibrant mix of software engineering foundations, automated testing, and cyber-physical systems validation. Testing and validating autonomous systems was clearly a hot topic this year, coming up again and again across sessions and informal chats about deployment safety at scale.

Thanks to everyone who came to the SADE-SIM session and to the FSE organizers for another smooth run. We’re glad to have the paper out in the proceedings, and we’re looking forward to continuing these conversations with researchers and practitioners working on the safety, validation, and scalability of autonomous aerial systems.

You can view the presentation slides here.