Drone Path Planning for Secure Positioning and Secure Position Verification

Many dependable systems rely on the integrity of the position of their components. In such systems, two key problems are secure localization and secure location verification of the components. Researchers proposed several solutions, which generally require expensive infrastructures of several fixed stations (anchors) with trusted positions. In this paper, we explore the approach of replacing all the fixed anchors with a single drone that flies through a sequence of waypoints. At each waypoint, the drone acts as an anchor and securely determines the positions. This approach completely eliminates the need for many expensive anchors. The main challenge becomes how to find a convenient path for the drone to do this for all the devices. The problem presents novel aspects, which make existing path planning algorithms unsuitable. We propose LocalizerBee, VerifierBee, and PreciseVerifierBee: three path planning algorithms that allow a drone to respectively measure, verify, and verify with a guaranteed precision a set of positions in a secure manner. They are able to securely localize all the positions in a generic deployment area, even in the presence of drone control errors. Moreover, they produce short path lengths and they run in a reasonable processing time.