Drone Swarm Formation Based for Drone Interception Missions

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The widespread adoption of drones poses various security risks, making new technologies a vital need, in order to detect and promptly respond to intruders, rogue drones, and malicious drones.

A newly-developed defense drone swarm can self-organize its defense formation when it detects an intruder. A team of researchers at the University of Luxembourg have developed a new feasible and efficient defense system for unmanned aerial vehicles, that is capable of chasing the malicious drone as a networked swarm.

Matthias Brust, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told techxplore.com that the speed, flexibility and autonomy of drones pose risk to cities. “Our research focuses on the question of how a drone defense system can act quickly and autonomously against rough or malicious drones entering the flight zone, and take appropriate counter-measures.”

The team developed a new defense system that can intercept and escort malicious or rogue drones outside of the flight zone. Their system is comprised of a swarm of drones that can organize its defense formation automatically when detecting an intruder, chasing it and neutralizing the threat.

“We developed a modular and local algorithm, which runs on each drone to enable it to make the right decision autonomously based on the state of its neighboring drones—forming a so-called ‘intelligent swarm’ of drones,” Brust explained. “After initial deployment and detection of an intruder, the defense drones form a self-organized network and intercept the intruder by isolating it through a local encapsulation algorithm from its environment to escort it out of the flight zone.”

The researchers developed a new auto-balanced clustering process, which ensures that the drone swarm arranges itself in an effective formation to intercept and capture rogue drones. Once captured, the swarm can then safely escort the malicious vehicle outside of the flight zone.

“The most challenging task was to develop a local algorithm that doesn’t require a system-wide consensus to function,” Brust said. “Additionally, we needed to make sure that each drone is able to switch into the correct phase of the defense maneuvers in the right moment.”

He added that they approached this problem with a modular design which creates balanced swarm-wide interception structures for the capture and escorting formation.

The system’s modular design consists of five phases: deployment, clustering, formation, chase, and escort.

Tests using a prototype drone simulator revealed that the system is feasible, resilient against communication losses, and performs consistently well. Having successfully completed initial evaluations and simulations, the researchers are about to test their defense system on real drones.

The research was outlined in a paper pre-published on arXiv.