Multi-Agent System for Rogue Drone Interception

Abstract

A multitude of applications based on unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs), in conjunction with the UAVs' diminishing costs and increasing capabilities, present a major threat to public safety as well as critical infrastructure security, leading to the need for versatile and robust counter-drone solutions. This work presents a novel multi-agent jamming system (MUAV-JS), where a group of cooperative autonomous agents employ various algorithms (detection, tracking, jamming, and self-localization) to counter unauthorized drone operations. The proposed system employs a joint wireless jamming and cooperative positioning framework to best track and intercept the moving rogue drone, utilizing a relative positioning system based on signals of opportunity in conjunction with inertial and vision measurements. Software-defined radio technology is incorporated on the pursuer agent to achieve rogue drone GPS disruption, while at the same time the autonomous agents cooperate to compute the location estimate of the pursuer agent. In the presence of jamming, to improve the wireless communication performance of the autonomous agents, a cellular communication architecture is also used as an additional channel for control and information exchange. For evaluation purposes, a prototype multi-agent system is designed, implemented, and tested in a real-world environment to demonstrate its enhanced localization and jamming performance, when compared to single-agent approaches.