Detection and Identification of Non-cooperative UAV Using a COTS mmWave Radar

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming potential threats to security-sensitive areas and personal privacy. A UAV can shoot photos at height, but how to detect such an uninvited intruder is an open problem. This article presents mmHawkeye, a passive approach for non-cooperative UAV detection and identification with a commercial off-the-shelf millimeter wave (mmWave) radar. mmHawkeye does not require prior knowledge of the type, motions, and flight trajectory of the UAV, while exploiting the signal feature induced by the UAV ' s periodic micro-motion (PMM) for long-range accurate detection. The design is therefore effective in dealing with low signal-to-noise ratio and uncertain reflected signals from the UAV. After analyzing the theoretical model of the PMM feature, mmHawkeye can further track the UAV ' s position containing range, azimuth and altitude angle with dynamic programming and particle filtering and then identify it with a Long Short-Term Memory-based detector. We implement mmHawkeye on a commercial mmWave radar and evaluate its performance under varied settings. The experimental results show that mmHawkeye has a detection accuracy of 95.8% and can realize detection at a range up to 80 m.