Swarm-based Counter UAV Defense System

Abstract Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have quickly become one of the promising Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices for smart cities thanks to their mobility, agility, and onboard sensors' customizability. UAVs are used in many applications expanding beyond the military to more commercial ones, ranging from monitoring, surveillance, mapping to parcel delivery. As governments plan using UAVs to build fresh economic potential for innovation, urban planners are moving forward to incorporate so-called UAV flight zones and UAV highways in their smart city design. However, the high-speed and dynamic flow of UAVs needs to be monitored to detect and, subsequently, to deal with intruders, rough drones, and UAVs with a malicious intent. Autonomous defense systems consisting of collaboratively working UAVs as a swarm will gain increasing importance, since a manually conducted defense is bound to fail due to the high dynamics involved in UAV maneuvering. This paper proposes a UAV defense system for intercepting and escorting intruders. The proposed UAV defense system consists of a defense UAV swarm, which is capable to self-organize their defense formation in the event of intruder detection, and chase the malicious UAV. Our fully localized approach follows a modular design regarding the defense phases and it uses a newly developed balanced clustering to realize the intercept- and capture-formation. The resulting networked defense UAV swarm is resilient against communication losses. Finally, a prototype UAV simulator has been implemented. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility and performance of our approach.