Consumer Drones Targeting by Sodar (Acoustic Radar)

Consumer drones have recently become a threat in many real scenarios, since they are difficult to detect and track, and can be easily used to perform criminal activities such as smuggling of illicit materials, surveillance operations or network hacking, and stealing data. Existing technologies are either not suitable to detect an object that can be as small as 10 cm, or quite expensive and complicated to deploy. We carried out a field experiment to explore the possibility of tuning a well-known, low-cost acoustic radar (sodar), commonly used in atmospheric physics, to detect and track consumer drones. The vertical position of a small drone retrieved by a single-sodar antenna turned out to be in good agreement with that measured by its onboard GPS (correlation coefficient 0.93), and no significant bias was observed. Despite being preliminary, these results support the use of such a technique to retrieve reliably the position of small unmanned aerial vehicles.