Laser ranging used for micro UAV localization: characteristics and limitations

Abstract

Due to the growing threat of a wide range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including consumer micro-drones that are increasingly used for defense purposes, the need to develop active and passive countermeasures against armed and intelligence gathering UAVs has been identified in order to increase force protection, critical infrastructure resilience, and information security. Several counter-drone solutions have been reported. To accomplish the task of UAV localization, in addition to electro-optical detection and tracking, we consider the distance determination as a fundamental task for stand-alone observation stations. Laser Ranging is one of the promising tools and currently widely used in determination of distance to large objects or slow-moving targets. Within the scope of this paper we are going to evaluate the features and limitations, when applying it for performing laser ranging on UAV. As a target, we are using a typical representative of commercial micro UAV. In this paper, we will present theoretical analysis and experimental results of UAV laser range measurements under realistic environmental conditions. Investigations about the laser transmitter signal are included. We are going to describe qualitative results of laser ranging at different operational modes. Research is based on ranging micro UAV from different directions and various distances. To estimate the maximum ranging distance on the limits of our system, we are going to apply an artificial scaled reference target. This target creates the same optical reflectance cross section as our commercial micro UAV with a given distance.