Design of Real-Time Drone Positioning System Based on Multiple Signal Classification Algorithm

Recently, there has been a great development in drone technology and its multiple uses in all security, military, commercial, health and entertainment fields Despite its many benefits, some criminal or terrorist groups can use drones to carry out their criminal activities due to their easy access. Radar systems suffer from many challenges in detecting drone locations due to their small size and low-altitude flight. In this paper, a system designed and implemented to track and monitor the real-time radio frequency of drones using an array antenna and cloud servers. It consists of software-defined radios (4-RTL-SDR) that used to form an array antenna to receive the drone’s radio frequency signal. The signal source locations (DOA, direction of arrival) are estimated using the MUSIC (Multiple Signal Classification) algorithm. An Android application used on any mobile device is used to read the results by connecting to the cloud server over the Internet. The proposed system is tested using the simulation program in MATLAB 2017b and practical application. The results obtained through the simulation and practical application are compared and discussed.