An SDR-based Passive Radar for Detection and Tracking of Drones and UAVs

Drones and Unmanned aerial vehicles have gained high popularity and are equally dangerous and threaten infrastructures and public safety. Monitoring of such unmanned aerial vehicles is of great importance not only for defense but as well for civilian sectors. Implementing an active radar is not always feasible to track these aerial targets in urban areas and due to possible interference with other critical RF systems. A non-invasive solution for the detection and tracking of drones and UAVs is proposed in this paper. In this paper, a passive radar has been implemented using software-defined radio, lowcost hardware, and custom codes. The proposed system has been tested in outdoor experimental setups with results that validate drone detection and tracking using passive radar.