[Paper Review] An Autonomous Drone System with Jamming and Relative Positioning Capabilities

Nicolas Souli, Panayiotis Kolios+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Jun 9, 2022

UAV Applications and Optimization4 citations

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous drone system that integrates real-time rogue drone detection, GPS jamming, and relative positioning using signals of opportunity (SOPs) and inertial measurements via a software-defined radio (SDR). The system dynamically switches between jamming and relative positioning modes, achieving a mean absolute error (MAE) of less than 6 m in 90% of cases during jamming attacks, outperforming GPS in accuracy under interference.

ABSTRACT

As the number of unauthorized operations of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is rising, the implementation of a versatile counter-drone system is becoming a necessity. In this work, we develop a drone-based counter-drone system, that employs algorithms for detecting and tracking a rogue drone, in conjunction with wireless interception capabilities to jointly jam the rogue drone while achieving self positioning for the pursuer drone. In the proposed system a software-defined-radio (SDR) is used for switching between jamming transmissions and spectrum sweeping functionalities to achieve the desired GPS disruption and self-localization, respectively. Extensive field experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in a realworld environment under various parameter settings.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the growing threat of unauthorized UAV operations, especially in critical infrastructure zones.
• To develop a cost-effective, civilian-applicable counter-drone solution that avoids reliance on expensive military-grade systems.
• To enable autonomous pursuit of rogue drones while maintaining self-localization when GPS is jammed.
• To integrate jamming and relative positioning into a single SDR-based platform for real-time operation.
• To validate the system’s performance under real-world conditions with varying jamming and flight complexity.

Proposed method

• A vision-based detection and tracking algorithm identifies and follows rogue drones in real time.
• A software-defined radio (SDR) switches between jamming transmissions and spectrum sweeping to enable both GPS disruption and relative positioning.
• Relative positioning is achieved by fusing signals of opportunity (SOPs) from ambient transmitters with inertial measurement unit (IMU) data.
• A threshold-based switching mechanism (T_d) triggers temporary pause in jamming to allow reinitialization of relative positioning when error exceeds a predefined limit.
• The system uses a hybrid navigation approach: RPS-JS (Relative Positioning with SDR Jamming System) for localization and SDR-based jamming for interference.
• Field experiments use real hardware to evaluate performance across diverse outdoor flight routes and jamming scenarios.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 Can a single drone platform simultaneously perform real-time rogue drone detection, GPS jamming, and autonomous relative positioning under interference?
• RQ2 How does the performance of relative positioning (RPS-JS) compare to GPS when GPS signals are degraded or blocked by jamming?
• RQ3 What is the trade-off between jamming effectiveness and localization accuracy based on the threshold (T_d) for switching between modes?
• RQ4 How does the system maintain localization accuracy during extended jamming attacks and complex flight trajectories?
• RQ5 To what extent does the use of SOPs and IMU fusion improve navigation reliability when GPS is unavailable?

Key findings

• The RPS-JS system achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of less than 6 meters in 90% of cases during jamming attacks, significantly outperforming GPS, which exceeded 6 meters in 50% of cases.
• In trajectory comparisons, the RPS-JS system maintained a median deviation of 10% or less from the ground truth (GT) across multiple segments, with the worst segment (C-D) showing only 13% deviation.
• When T_d was increased to 1.3 m, the system reduced switching frequency between jamming and positioning, improving localization reliability at the cost of slightly reduced jamming duration.
• The cumulative error analysis showed that RPS-JS consistently outperformed GPS in terms of accumulated position error, especially under sustained jamming.
• Statistical boxplots confirmed that RPS-JS localization performance was comparable to GT in both median and mean values across 25 outdoor experiments.
• The system successfully maintained functionality across complex flight routes, demonstrating robustness despite increased navigation complexity and frequent mode switching.