Drone system detects and blocks unwanted flying robots nearby
Project SCOUT: Interceptor Drone for Perimeter Defense
Robotics
Summary
Unauthorized drones flying near protected areas can be a problem. The authors created SCOUT, a drone system that sees and tracks other drones all by itself, without help from ground stations. It uses smart software to recognize and follow a target drone smoothly, even when the view gets tricky. The defender drone moves in real time to block the incoming drone near a border. Tests show it works well most of the time, proving that drones can guard areas visually and act quickly by themselves.
What this means in practice
- •For security teams: Guard restricted areas from unauthorized drone intrusions by deploying unmanned drones that autonomously detect and block incoming targets using onboard vision and control.
- •For delivery fleet operators: Protect delivery hubs by automatically intercepting unauthorized drones approaching the perimeter to reduce risk of theft or interference during unloading.
Authors
Azmain Yousuf, Siwei Cai, Knut Peterson, Lifeng Zhou, David Han
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created a growing need for robust, jamming-resistant counter-UAV systems for perimeter defense. This paper presents \textbf{SCOUT} (Spatial Computation for Optimized UAV Tracking), a ROS-integrated onboard perception and control framework for real-time aerial defense against incoming UAVs. SCOUT performs visual detection, target association, track filtering, and control command generation directly onboard the defender UAV, without relying on external sensing infrastructure or ground-station computation. To provide stable control inputs, the perception pipeline combines TensorRT-accelerated drone detection with ByteTrack-based association and a lightweight track-retention state machine. The state machine rejects abrupt target jumps and maintains short-term target continuity during temporary detection degradation, reducing unstable control responses caused by false detections or target switching. We evaluate the proposed architecture through an integrated hardware deployment executing a planar ``goalkeeping'' interception strategy. In this setting, the defender UAV tracks the incoming target and adjusts its motion to maintain a blocking configuration near the protected boundary. Real-world flight results show that SCOUT maintains valid target detections for 92.2\% of frames while operating at real-time onboard detection rates, demonstrating the feasibility of visual tracking and closed-loop control for UAV perimeter defense. A video demonstration of the end-to-end perimeter defense operation is available online. https://figshare.com/s/497befc033091fc0b84f