Advanced hoListic Adverse Drone Detection, Identification & Neutralization

Technologies for prevention, investigation, and mitigation
in the context of fight against crime and terrorism

Autonomous drone with ability to track and capture an aerial target – ICUAS 2020 paper

The 2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems, ICUAS ’20, will be held for the first time outside the U.S.A., in Athens, Greece. The major themes of ICUAS ’20 are: integration of manned-unmanned aviation into the national airspace, legal, ethical and privacy issues, regulations, benefits of unmanned aviation to society, UAS/RPAS design for safety, reliability and resilience, and technology standards, all contributing to building high-confidence systems. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, the conference has been postponed to September 1-4, 2020. ALADDIN partner, FADA-CATEC has produced and submitted a scientific paper to the 2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’20) with regards to the ALADDIN project. The title of the paper is “Autonomous drone with ability to track and capture an aerial target ” and its abstract is presented below.

Abstract: This article presents an autonomous aerial system developed for the first challenge of Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Competition (MBZIRC) 2020, consisting of the autonomous interception of an aerial target flying on a variable trajectory and speed, and also bursting several balloons randomly placed over a certain area, also fully autonomous. This work presents a prototype of a capture aerial robot designed specifically for the scenario under consideration, with the aim of integrating the necessary equipment to autonomously detect, track and capture the target drone. Both the hardware architecture and the software that allows to perform this fully autonomous complex mission are described in the paper, as well as the tools used for the integration and execution of the different functional modules. Apart from that, the Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) algorithms implemented for the tracking of the target are also explained. Finally the system is tested in a simulation environment and also validated with real experiments, which most interesting results are presented.