Simplified Experimental Evaluation of Radio Emitter Localization Using UAV-Based Sensors

Recently, various efforts have been made to utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), even for application technologies expected in the future including positioning/localization. For examples, UAVs can be used to detect the location of victims in disaster areas to facilitate the rescue support. They can be also used to estimate the position of illegally emitted radio wave sources for monitoring proper radio wave usage. In conventional studies, the positioning/localization of ground-based radio wave sources were conducted using the positional fingerprinting method by placing multiple radio-frequency (RF) sensors at predetermined locations in an urban environment. In this paper, time-series based fingerprinting method is further-more proposed using aerial RF sensors. Specifically, the proposed low-cost and high-accuracy location estimation method is realized by flying a single UAV as a receiving sensor on a predetermined trajectory and expanding the data used in the original location fingerprinting method with respect to the time axis to achieve a time-series data. Simplified validation experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method in this paper.