Gimbal Camera-Based Flight Guidance for Striking Illegal Drones

초록

As the illegal use of drones has emerged as a social issue, drone interception technology to directly strike a target has rapidly developed. However, existing methods using a fixed camera are often too slow to successfully strike the target, or may miss the target entirely. To address this issue, this paper proposes an interceptor flight guidance algorithm that tracks and strikes drones using a gimbal camera. First, artificial intelligence techniques detect the target on a real-time video stream from a gimbal camera. Next, the gimbal tracks the detected target so that it is centered in the image. Lastly, based on the pitch and yaw angles of the gimbal, the desired linear and angular velocity vector commands of the interceptor are generated to track and strike the target. To validate the proposed method’s performance, simulation environments based on a physics engine are established. We test the proposed method in two scenarios with different starting distances between the interceptor and the drone. At a far distance from the target, the proposed method strikes 4.4 s faster than the existing method. Moreover, when the distance is too close and the field of view is too limited, methods using a fixed camera fail to strike the target, whereas our method has a greater than 80% success rate. These results demonstrate that the proposed method strikes targets more efficiently and successfully. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

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