Detection and Tracking of Drone Swarms using LiDAR

This paper introduces LiSWARM, a low-cost LiDAR system to detect and track individual drones in a large swarm. LiSWARM provides robust and precise localization and recognition of drones in 3D space, which is not possible with state-of-the-art drone tracking systems that rely on radio-frequency (RF), acoustic, or RGB image signatures. It includes (1) an efficient data processing pipeline to process the point clouds, (2) robust priority-aware clustering algorithms to isolate swarm data from the background, (3) a reliable neural network-based algorithm to recognize the drones, and (4) a technique to track the trajectory of every drone in the swarm. We develop the LiSWARM prototype and validate it through both in-lab and field experiments. Notably, we measure its performance during two drone light shows involving 150 and 500 drones and confirm that the system achieves up to 98% accuracy in recognizing drones and reliably tracking drone trajectories. To evaluate the scalability of LiSWARM, we conduct a thorough analysis to benchmark the system's performance with a swarm consisting of 15,000 drones. The results demonstrate the potential to leverage LiSWARM for other applications, such as battlefield operations, errant drone detection, and securing sensitive areas such as airports and prisons.