Cases / Applied AI · 2025
Drone Fleet Telemetry: from Unreal Simulation to Jira Tickets
A proof of concept where a simulated drone acts as an IoT device and n8n turns its telemetry into prioritised Jira incidents, with no custom backend.
RoleProduct owner and prototype architect
Period2025
DomainSimulation, IoT telemetry, incident management
StackUnreal Engine 5, n8n, Jira REST API
Context
I wanted to test how far you can get without writing a custom backend: can a simulation act as an IoT edge device and drive real incident management through low-code workflows?
My role
I designed and built the proof of concept, using AI coding agents for implementation.
What I did
- Telemetry source (Unreal Engine 5). Simulates 6-DOF drone flight and serialises telemetry to JSON, firing asynchronous POST requests on state triggers via the HTTP subsystem.
- Orchestration (n8n). Ingests the webhook payloads, parses the JSON and routes events by conditional logic.
- Incident management (Jira). Tickets are created through the REST API with priority set by event type.
- Triage rules. A battery voltage drop below 20% creates a low-priority maintenance request; a collision creates a high-priority asset-loss report.
Result
- Working end-to-end flow from simulated event to prioritised Jira ticket, shown in the videos below.
- Adding a new event type, for example signal jamming, is mainly a new routing rule in n8n rather than a change to a backend.
- Limits: this is a proof of concept. It has not been load-tested and carries no production telemetry.
Demo
Screens
