A Novel Direction of Arrival Estimation Algorithm via Received Signal Strength of Directional Antennas

Recently, the number of accidents and incidents involving remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) have dramatically increased. Therefore, the development of a complete software and hardware system based on antenna arrays and direction of arrival (DoA) estimation for the localization of intruding RPA has attracted the attention of researchers and engineers. DoA estimation can be achieved via relative phase between antennas in an antenna array or via received signal strength (RSS) estimation of an array of directional antennas. Previous works on DoA estimation via received signal strength (RSS) used platonic solid geometry associated with the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm. In this paper, we propose a novel DoA estimation algorithm for the localization of drones exploiting their incoming NTSC video signal. Next we validate our algorithm by using an AD-FMCOMMS5-EBZ software defined radio (SDR) platform with a Yagi-Uda antenna array in a measurement campaign. The results from the measurement campaign show that from the 19 different measured DoAs from -90° to 90° with steps of 10°, we obtained a good measurement for 14 estimates, including the end-fire positions, which are critical in traditional omnidirectional antenna array based solutions.