Signal Acquisition & Processing from the Drone
Relevant Publications: TMC '20, SECON '19
Multi-modal analysis of wireless signals captured from the drone enable applications ranging from search and rescue missions, spectrum violation detection and electronic warfare.
#1. HiPER-V: A High Precision Radio Frequency Vehicle for Aerial Measurements.
There is a growing interest towards enabling practical, dynamic and agile wireless applications by systems of independent or cooperative mobile agents such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Such mobile UAVs are often constrained on resources like storage, power and radio capabilities and require accurate position information to facilitate many of these wireless applications. In this paper, we introduce HiPER-V, which is a generalized UAV prototype platform to enable a broad range of applications in wireless communications using a single UAV or can be extended to a swarm of UAVs. We implement HiPER-V by using an UAV, equipped with resource constrained radio devices, and high precision position information available via RTK-GPS modules, achieving a median position accuracy of 3.8 cm. The details of implementation of HiPER-V and its applicability to a wide variety of applications in wireless communications are presented in this paper. With minimal payload and simple software modification, our solution can be ported to any UAV platform and extended to multiple UAV testbeds that enable an array of research in wireless applications using UAVs.
#2. Localizing RF Sources
We introduce RFEye, a generalized technique to locate signals independent of the waveform, using a single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with only one omnidirectional antenna. This is achieved by acquiring signals from uncoordinated positions within a sphere of 1-meter radius at two nearby locations and formulating an asynchronous, distributed receiver beamforming at the UAV to compute the Direction of Arrival (DoA) from the unknown transmitter. The proposed method includes four steps: 1) Blind detection and extraction of unique signature in the signal to be localized, 2) Asynchronous signal acquisition and conditioning, 3) DoA calculation by creating a virtual distributed antenna array at UAV and 4) Obtaining position fix of emitter using DoA from two locations. These steps are analyzed for various sources of error, computational complexity and compared with widely used signal subspace-based DoA estimation algorithms. RFEye is implemented using an Intel-Aero UAV, equipped with a USRP B205 software-defined radio to acquire signals from a ground emitter.
Maqsood Careem
Multimodal signal procesing using signals acquired by a UAV enable accurate localization and detection of RF sources to facilitate a variety of applications.