Drone
Drone
Abstract. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are expected to play an
essential role in future life. However, if drone technology is misused, it will bring unpredictable
harm. For example, the use of drones to engage in illegal, criminal, and terrorist activities has
brought new challenges to confidentiality, security, and counter-terrorism. The demand for anti-
drone systems from all walks of life is rising. These systems can detect and prevent the activities
of illegal drones, so that the technology of drones can be used well. This article introduces the
current mainstream methods of UAV detection, and then uses the radio frequency (RF) control
and map transmission signal exchanged between the drone and its remote controller to achieve
a way of passive radio detection of drones.
1. Introduction
The use of civilian drones has increased dramatically in recent years due to lower costs. Similarly, drones
are rapidly gaining popularity around the world. However, the way drones are being used has raised
public concerns. For example, on July 9, 2020, in Shexian County, Anhui Province, two drones broke
into the examination room; on June 17, 2020, there were people flying drones within the scope of
Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, which caused dozens of planes to fail; in January 2015, the
invasion of the White House by a DJI drone caused a huge sensation; drones are accused of invading
privacy and even engaging in illegal and criminal activities. These incidents provide numerous examples
of the critical importance of developing surveillance systems for suspected drones.
The article is organized as follows. Section II introduces several mainstream UAV detection methods.
Section III describes the signal characteristics of the drone and demonstrates the separation of a remote
control signal and map transmission signal by morphological filtering. Section IV presents the detection
principle of drone map transmission signal. Section V introduces a detection method of drone remote
control signals. Section VI ends this article.
2. Related Works
As the equipment characteristics of different types of UAVs vary greatly, and there are many
interferences in the environment, the reliable detection of UAVs is a challenging task. The literature
provides many different methods of drone detection [1]. At present, researchers mainly detect UAVs
from visual detection, acoustic detection, radar detection, and radio frequency (RF) passive detection.
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
Drone detection and tracking based on computer vision have significant advantages [3], including:
1. Capable of detecting drones without RF transmission
2. Use passive and inexpensive optical sensors
3. Excellent inherent directional accuracy
The main disadvantage of optical sensors is that they do not work well in bad weather conditions,
and they are not applicable at night. They also cannot operate under NLOS conditions, such as in an
urban environment. In addition, in practical applications, it is difficult to strictly distinguish drones from
flying birds, balloons, etc., and it is easily blocked by obstacles in the environment. In order to detect at
night, some scholars have developed infrared sensing technology through thermal imaging cameras [4].
The heat emitted by the drone is used for detection by analyzing thermal images. However, this method
is difficult to effectively detect such small targets as drones, mainly because drones do not generate a
lot of heat, and the heat radiation characteristics are not obvious, and they are greatly affected by the
thermal radiation of the environment.
2.4. RF (passive)
The Radio Frequency (RF) based detection methods mainly use the communication or map transmission
signal between the drone and the ground controller to detect the drone. Drone communication protocols
usually use the same frequency bands used for WiFi transmissions, particularly in the 2.400–2.483 GHz
and 5.725–5.825 GHz. A drone equipped with a camera usually transmits a video stream to its control
unit through the same wireless channel.
A simple method is to monitor a wide range of RF signals, such as 1 MHz to 6.8 GHz in [12], and
treat any transmitter of unknown RF signals as a drone. Since the unknown RF transmitter is not
necessarily a drone, this method will lead to a high probability of false alarms. RF detection is detected
by remote control signals or map transmission signals, but when the drone uses GPS navigation to fly
autonomously, this method will fail.
Compared with active methods, passive detection has lower costs in terms of hardware and software
requirements, operation and maintenance, portability and ease of deployment, and flexibility to
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
interception. Therefore, this article focuses on the passive method, in which the drone sends a signal,
and then we detect and recognize it.
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
Figure 2(a). Drone signals Figure 2(b). Extracted Figure 2(c). Extracted map
composed of remote control remote control signal transmission signal
and map transmission data
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
Among them, Rss ( ) is the autocorrelation function of the remote control signal, Rsn ( ) is the
cross-correlation function of the remote control signal and noise, Rnn ( ) is the autocorrelation
function of noise, and T is the time of receiving data, including multiple frequency hopping periods Th .
When the signal-to-noise ratio is small, the cross-correlation function of the signal to ae detected and
the noise signal can ae ignored and is close to 0; or the signal is not correlated with the aaussian white
noise signal, and the cross-correlation function is also close to 0, so the aaove formula is simplified for
R ( ) = Rss ( ) + Rnn ( ) (3)
Assuming that the received data contains signals with N hops, different hop signals are uncorrelated,
that is, the cross-correlation function is 0, while ignoring the impact of not a complete frequency hopping
period data included in the received data, we can get:
N
Rss ( ) = Rsjsj ( ), j is an integer (4)
j =1
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
1 T j − 2
Th 0
Rsjsj ( ) = { A cos(2 f j t + j ) cos[2 f j +1 (t + ) + j +1 ) dt
+
Tj
A2 cos(2 f j t + j ) cos[2 f j +1 (t + ) + j +1 )dt} (6)
T j −
A2 T −
cos(2 f j ) h
= , Th
2 Th
When the received signal contains a frequency hopping signal, the autocorrelation function is
expressed as
A2 Th −
cos(2 f j ) + Rnn ( ), 0 Th
Rx ( ) = 2 Th (7)
R ( ), T T
nn h
When there is no frequency hopping signal in the received signal, the autocorrelation function is
expressed as
Rx ( ) = Rnn ( ) (8)
Therefore, when the time delay of the autocorrelation function of the received signal is different in
0 < 𝜏 ≤ 𝑇ℎ and 𝑇ℎ < 𝜏 < 𝑇, the different function values can ae used to determine the presence or
aasence of the frequency hopping signal.
Experimental results of measured UAV remote control signal data:
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
Among them, s f (n)(i = 1, 2, …,p ) represents p fixed frequency signals mixed in the signal,
i
shj (n)( j = 1, 2, …,q) represents q frequency hopping signals to ae processed, z(n) is the noise signal,
and N is the signal length. Divide the signal into L pieces of data that grow into M, namely
xNk (n)(k = 1, 2, …,L) , and then use FFT to find the power spectrum of each piece of data xNk (n) ,
expressed as
2
1 M −1 k
^
S ( ) = xN (n)e− jn ,1 k L
M n =0
k
xNk
(10)
Add the power spectrum oatained from each piece of data and average it, and the average power
___
spectrum S xN ( ) of the received signal can ae oatained as
2
___
1 L ^
1 L M −1 k
S xN ( ) = S k ( ) = xN (n)e− jn (11)
L k =1 ML k =1 n=0
Assuming that the p fixed-frequency signals s f (n)(i = 1, 2, …,p ) always exist in the received
i
xN (n) data, the power spectrum of the i-th fixed-frequency signal s if (n) in the k-th segment data
signal is
2
1 M −1 ki
^
S ( ) = ki
f S f (n)e− jn ,1 k L,1 i p
M n =0
(12)
Assuming that the frequency of the FH signal shj ( n) in the received signal is f j ( j = 1, 2, …, q) ,
there are m j times in the received signal of length L ( m j = N L / N M , N L is the numaer of sampling
points of the frequency hopping signal, N M is the numaer of sampling points of each segment of the
signal after segmentation) , The power spectrum of the frequency hopping signal shj ( n) in the received
signal is expressed as
2
^
1 M −1 j
Sh ( ) =
j
sh (n)e ,1 j q
M n =0
− j n
(14)
Perform FFT transformation on the segmented data, and get the average power spectrum of the
frequency hopping signal shj ( n) expressed as
2
1 j M −1 j
__ m m
1 j ^
S ( ) = Shj ( ) =
h
j
sh (n)e− jn ,1 j q (15)
L k =1 ML k =1 n=0
It can ae seen from the aaove two formulas that in the average power spectrum, the power of the
frequency hopping signal has aecome m j / L times that of the original signal in each segment, so the
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
average power spectrum of the entire segment of data can eliminate the power spectrum of the frequency
hopping signal , Only the power spectrum of the fixed frequency signal is left.
According to this feature, the power spectrum of each piece of data is suatracted from the average
power spectrum of the entire piece of data, accumulated and summed, the fixed frequency signal is
cancelled, and the frequency hopping power is almost unchanged. Define the parameter power
cancellation ratio as
= p1 / p2 (16)
Where p1 represents the power after segmentation, p2 represents the power after cancellation,
and the threshold is set. Usually the threshold is set according to the selection of the window
function, the signal-to-noise ratio SNR of the signal to ae detected, and the numaer of segments of the
received data , FFT length is set, if , the signal to ae detected is a frequency hopping signal,
otherwise it is a fixed frequency signal.
The detection steps are as follows:
Figure 7. Power spectrum cancellation of the measured remote control signal. (a) The power spectrum
of the original signal; (b) Average power spectrum; (c) Power spectrum after cancellation
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ECNCT 2020 IOP Publishing
Journal of Physics: Conference Series 1738 (2021) 012044 doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1738/1/012044
5. Conclusion
This article first introduces several ways of drone presence detection. Through the detection and analysis
of the drone communication signal, it can be judged whether there is a drone in the space, which is a
promising direction. The advantage of the method proposed in this paper is that the amount of
calculation is small and the implementation on hardware is relatively easy. It has good detection
performance without knowing the characteristic parameters of the drone signal in advance, but the
disadvantage is that it is in a complex electromagnetic environment. We can only eliminate the
interference of fixed-frequency signals, and there are many other interference signals that cannot be
solved. Our next plan is to continue our efforts in eliminating more interference. Then we can determine
the position of the drone and the controller by analyzing the angle of arrival of the drone signal.
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