Low Cost Antenna Array Based Drone Tracking Device for Outdoor Environments

Applications of direction of arrival (DoA) techniques have dramatically increased in various areas ranging from the traditional wireless communication systems and rescue operations to GNSS systems and drone tracking. Particularly, police forces and security companies have drawn their attention to drone tracking devices, in order to provide the safeness of citizens and of clients, respectively. In this paper, we propose a low cost antenna array based drone tracking device for outdoor environments. The proposed solution is divided into hardware and software parts. The hardware part of the proposed device is based on off-the-shelf components such as an omnidirectional antenna array, a 4-channel software defined radio (SDR) platform with carrier frequency ranging from 70 MHz to 6 GHz, a FPGA motherboard, and a laptop. The software part includes algorithms for calibration, model order selection (MOS), and DoA estimation, including specific preprocessing steps and a tensor-based estimator to increase the DoA accuracy. We evaluate the performance of our proposed low cost solution in outdoor scenarios. According to our measurement campaigns, we show that when the array is in the front fire position, i.e., with a DoA ranging from -60 degrees to 60 degrees, the maximum and the average DoA errors are 6 degrees and 1,9 degrees, respectively.