A Drone Localization System Based on Multiple Time Delays Fusion

The recent years have witnessed the prosperity of the amateur drones. In spite of the great convenience brought by drones, the potential issues caused by drones, including public security and individual privacy leakage, cannot be overlooked. To counter the abuse of drones, in this paper, we design a novel drone localization system using two tetrahedral acoustic arrays, which can effectively localize drones within 100meter range. We propose a novel time difference of arrival (TDOA) estimation algorithm which combines generalized cross-correlation and probabilistic data association algorithms to accurately estimate TDOA. Different from the existing TDOA estimation algorithms, the proposed algorithm overcomes the multi-path effect and ensures the effectiveness under the low-signal-noise ratio environment. In order to further improve the performance of the proposed algorithm, we develop a novel algorithm to optimize the procedure of TDOA initialization based on dynamic programming. Finally, extensive experiments have been implemented to verify the effectiveness of our system and algorithms.