Demonstration of a Low-Cost, Highly-Proliferated Remote ID Drone Detection Network
Ian Faber, Anna Sophia Rorrer Warren, Jonathan Abrams, Matthew Januszewski, Muhannad Ibrahim, Reid Godbey, Ryan A. Caputo, Colton Brown, Sean Peters · 2024
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated that by March 16th, 2024, all registered drones must broadcast Remote Identification (RID) signals containing data detailing the drone’s location, velocity, heading, and serial number. Providing a cost-effective, real-time detection and reporting system in response to these regulations for complex environments – such as college campuses – remains a challenge. To address this, we have developed the Drone Operational Monitor for Aerial Identification Network (DOMAIN), which is a network of individual receivers – hereafter called nodes – that receive, process, and store RID signals for users of the DOMAIN system. DOMAIN provides a dynamically scalable (≥2.5 km2 area coverage), cost-effective (<$250/node), and robust (resistant to losing multiple nodes) solution to drone monitoring for companies and institutes with highly dynamic drone traffic. The DOMAIN system achieves this by using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) WiFi and Bluetooth modules to receive and demodulate RID signals, ensuring the reception of all protocols defined in the ASTM F3411-22 RID standard. The demodulated signals are then sent to a Raspberry Pi 4B running instances of Wireshark – an open-source packet analyzer – which decodes the signals and extracts all useful information. The data is subsequently sent to a central data server via the Raspberry Pi’s onboard WiFi chip where it is stored, reconciled with the data from other nodes, and presented to the user. The DOMAIN system is currently estimated to be a third of the cost of other on-market solutions. To date, we have demonstrated a working prototype of this process, successfully decoding multiple RID signals sent over 2.4 GHz WiFi from a popular, FAA-compliant drone (DJI Mini 3 Pro). At the time of publishing, we will have characterized the detection range of individual nodes as well as demonstrated DOMAIN’s capabilities for rapid deployment and resistance to RF interference.