Autonomous Drone Networks for Sensing, Localizing and Approaching RF Targets

We present FALCON, a novel autonomous drone network system for sensing, localizing, and approaching RF targets/sources such as smartphone devices. A potential application of our system includes a disaster relief mission 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 while also approaching the target, while flexibly trading off the intensities of the potentially conflicting objectives. We implement FALCON via a custom-designed multi-drone platform and demonstrate up to $2\times$ localization accuracy compared to a baseline flocking approach, while spending 30% less time localizing targets.