We propose PiNcH, a methodology to detect the presence of a drone and its current status leveraging just the communication traffic exchanged between the drone and its Remote Controller (RC). PiNcH is built applying standard classification algorithms to the eavesdropped traffic, analyzing features such as packets inter-arrival time and size. PiNcH does not require either any special hardware or to transmit any signal. Indeed, it is fully passive and it resorts to cheap and general purpose hardware. To evaluate the effectiveness of our solution, we collected real communication measurements from the 3DR SOLO drone, being the most popular open-source hardware, running the widespread ArduCopter open-source firmware, mounted on-board on a wide range of commercial amateur drones. Then, we test our solution against different publicly available wireless traces. The results prove that PiNcH can efficiently and effectively: (i) identify the presence of the drone in several heterogeneous scenarios; (ii) identify the current state of a powered-on drone, i.e., flying or lying on the ground; (iii) discriminate the movement of the drone; and, finally, (iv) estimate a lower bound on the time required to identify a drone with the requested level of assurance. The quality and viability of our solution do prove that network traffic analysis can be successfully adopted for drone identification and pave the way for future research in the area.
Authors in @cite_10 explored the feasibility of RF-based detection of drones by looking at radio physical characteristics of the communication channel when the drones's body is affected by vibration and body shifting. The analysis considered whether the received drone signals are uniquely differentiated from other mobile wireless phenomena such as cars equipped with Wi-Fi or humans carrying a mobile phone. The sensitivity of detection at distances of hundreds of meters as well as the accuracy of the overall detection system are evaluated using a SDR implementation. Being based on both RSSI and phase of the signals, the precision of the approach varies with the distance of the receiver from the transmitter. In addition, the solution resorts to physical layer information and special hardware (SDR), while our current contribution only exploits network layer information that can be collected by any WiFi device.
@cite_10
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Drones are increasingly flying in sensitive airspace where their presence may cause harm, such as near airports, forest fires, large crowded events, secure buildings, and even jails. This problem is likely to expand given the rapid proliferation of drones for commerce, monitoring, recreation, and other applications. A cost-effective detection system is needed to warn of the presence of drones in such cases. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of inexpensive RF-based detection of the presence of drones. We examine whether physical characteristics of the drone, such as body vibration and body shifting, can be detected in the wireless signal transmitted by drones during communication. We consider whether the received drone signals are uniquely differentiated from other mobile wireless phenomena such as cars equipped with Wi- Fi or humans carrying a mobile phone. The sensitivity of detection at distances of hundreds of meters as well as the accuracy of the overall detection system are evaluated using software defined radio (SDR) implementation. Mobile wireless sensor networks have been extensively deployed for enhancing environmental monitoring and surveillance. The availability of low-cost mobile robots equipped with a variety of sensors makes them promising in target coverage tasks. They are particularly suitable where quick, inexpensive, or nonlasting visual sensing solutions are required. In this paper, we consider the problem of low complexity target tracking to cover and follow moving targets using flying robots. We tackle this problem by clustering targets while estimating the camera location and orientation for each cluster separately through a cover-set coverage method. We also leverage partial knowledge of target mobility to enhance the efficiency of our proposed algorithms. Three computationally efficient approaches are developed: predictive fuzzy , predictive incremental fuzzy , and local incremental fuzzy . The objective is to find a compromise among coverage efficiency, traveled distance, number of drones required, and complexity. The targets move according to one of the following three possible mobility patterns: random waypoint, Manhattan grid, and reference point group mobility patterns. The feasibility of our algorithms and their performance are also tested on a real-world indoor testbed called drone-be-gone , using Parrot AR.Drone quadcopters. The deployment confirms the results obtained with simulations and highlights the suitability of the proposed solutions for real-time applications. Swarms of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) could provide great benefit when used for disaster response and indoor search and rescue scenarios. In these harsh environments where GPS availability cannot be ensured, prior work often relies on cameras for control and localization. This creates the challenge of identifying each drone, i.e., finding the association between each physical ID (such as their radio address) and their visual ID (such as an object tracker output). To address this problem, prior work relies on visual cues such as LEDs or colored markers to provide unique information for identification. However, these methods often increase deployment difficulty, are sensitive to environmental changes, not robust to distance and might require hardware changes. In this paper, we present IDrone, a robust physical drone identification system through motion matching and actuation feedback. The intuition is to (1) identify each drone by matching the motion detected through their inertial sensors and from an external camera, and (2) control the drones so they move in unique patterns that allow for fast identification, while minimizing the risk of collision involved in controlling drones with uncertain identification. To validate our approach, we conduct both simulation and real experimentation with autonomous drones for the simplified case of a stationary Spotter (powerful drone equipped with the camera). Overall, our initial results show that our approach offers a great tradeoff between fast identification and small collision probability. In particular, IDrone achieves faster identification time than safety-based baseline actuation (one-at-a-time), and significantly higher survival rate compared to fast, non-safety-based baseline actuation (random motion). RF-based transceiver-free object tracking, originally proposed by the authors, allows real-time tracking of a moving object, where the object does not have to be equipped with an RF transceiver. Our previous algorithm, the best cover algorithm, suffers from a drawback, i.e., it does not work well when there are multiple objects in the tracking area. In this paper, we propose a localization model of distance, transmission power and the signal dynamics caused by the objects. The signal dynamics are derived from the measured Radio Signal Strength Indication (RSSI). Using this new model, we propose the “probabilistic cover algorithm” which is based on distributed dynamic clustering thus it can dramatically improve the localization accuracy when multiple objects are present. Moreover, the probabilistic cover algorithm can reduce the tracking latency in the system. We argue that the small overhead of the proposed algorithm makes it scalable for large deployment. Experimental results show that in addition to its ability to identify multiple objects, the tracking accuracy is improved at a rate of 10 to 20 .