Remember when the co-founder of the game studio that made early Call of Duty titles accidentally crashed his drone into a firefighting plane battling the flames raging across Los Angeles last month?
Turns out, mishaps like that can be avoided for not a lot of money. In fact, researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah believe it can be done using an ad-hoc air traffic control setup for drones at a cost of just a few hundred dollars.
The team's Local Air Traffic Information System (LATIS) uses a network of inexpensive radars, a base station with networking gear and a laptop, and a clever algorithm to accurately track multiple drones flying at low altitudes (by the standards of airplanes) in real-time.
While you likely don't need the same sophisticated multi-million dollar equipment as the stuff used at airports' traffic control towers, it's intriguing to know that you can keep an eye on drones without a major investment.
Indeed, the BYU researchers' system is designed for temporary and quick installation using small, portable low-cost radars that don't need a lot of power.
They can also be recalibrated quickly in case any of the radars are bumped or moved. All of these attributes make this system potentially useful in areas affected by natural disasters or other calamities, where it's critical to be able to monitor drone activity and prevent collisions with aircraft.
The network of radars uses what's called real-time-kinematic global-positioning-system (RTK-GPS) data. Each of these is a phased-array radar, which can make scans of its field of view in under a second. By placing the radars 100 ft (30 m) apart, and orienting them skyward with overlapping fields of view, the team's algorithm is able to combine the data from these radars, and simultaneously track multiple drones as they move through the air.
This networked approach utilizing phased-array radars not only works well with drones flying at low altitudes, but overcomes the challenges of using a single radar: limited range, difficulty tracking objects in complex environments like crowded urban areas, and the potential for mechanical failure of a rotating radar.
The researchers noted in their paper, published last November in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, that their LATIS network successfully tracked drones with an average error magnitude of less than 3 ft (1 m) in each principle direction. That's pretty good for a quick-and-dirty setup – and it could pave the way for similar systems to be implemented during future natural disasters.
Source: Brigham Young University
