Detection and Tracking of Uncooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using a 2-Degree Of Freedom Robotic Manipulator

Since the past few years, the commercial unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector has grown significantly, thus making easier access of UAVs to public. Because these gadgets have the potential to inflict major risks intentionally or accidentally, this development has quickly aroused security concerns. Since then, many researchers have been working to develop a counter-drone system using different options such as acoustics, RF analyzers, optics, etc. This paper presents an idea on developing and implementing detection model of uncooperative quadcopter drones and track them simultaneously by using a 2 -degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator with an onboard camera. First, the detection model is discussed which is developed by training a modified You look only once (YOLO v2) object detector with a large dataset of labeled images of quadcopter. Further, the target's depth is estimated via the stereo camera integrated with RGB. Tracking of target drone is done by controlling the manipulator in Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) mode in which signal is sent as soon as the target is detected.