Enhanced RF-based 3D UAV Outdoor Geolocation: from Trilateration to Machine Learning Approaches

Recently the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, has exploded in several domains, leading to potential security issues. As such, estimating the exact position of those eventual malicious drones has become of crucial interest. However, computing an accurate and precise geolocation of these drones, especially in outdoor environments, remains challenging. This paper focuses on outdoor 3-dimensional (3D) drone geolocation techniques based on Radio Frequency (RF) signals. We first present a RF-based 3D drone geolocation dataset, and then apply and compare various geolocation techniques, ranging from geometrical-based to machine learning-based methods. We further propose a new hybrid method blending the two above categories of geolocation techniques, that achieves an average 3D error of the order of 11.7 meters within a search volume of about 520×560×115 m
³
, significantly below the one achieved with geometrical-based techniques, and with a reduced computational complexity compared to the regular machine-learning based techniques.