FALCON: A Networked Drone System for Sensing, Localizing, and Approaching RF Targets

Abstract

We present FALCON, a novel autonomous drone network system for sensing, localizing, and approaching RF targets/sources such as smartphone devices. Potential applications of our system include disaster relief missions in which networked drones sense the Wi-Fi signal emitted from a victim’s smartphone and dynamically navigate to accurately localize and quickly approach the victim, for instance, to deliver the time-critical first-aid kits. For that we exploit Wi-Fi’s recent fine time measurement (FTM) protocol to realize the first on-drone FTM sensor network that enables accurate and dynamic ranging of targets in a mission. We propose a flight planning strategy that adapts the trajectory of the drones to concurrently favor localizing and approaching the target. Namely, our approach jointly optimizes the drones’ diversity of observations and the target approaching process, while flexibly trading off the intensities of the potentially conflicting objectives. We implement FALCON via a custom-designed multidrone platform and demonstrate up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> localization accuracy compared to a baseline flocking approach, while spending 30% less time localizing targets.