PhD Forum: Robot Swarm-Enhanced Uncooperative Wireless Device Localisation

Abstract

Localising uncooperative wireless devices, such as rogue radios and jammers, is already a well-studied problem [1] , [2] . These kinds of devices can have negative impact on the rest of the network infrastructure, so they must be removed. On the other hand, localising wireless devices can be useful in Search-and-Rescue operations where the casualty has a mobile device but there is no network infrastructure. However to our knowledge, most works stay either theoretical and require certain assumptions or they have a real world prototype but have low accuracy. Uncooperative, in this case, means we have no control over the transmitted waveform, power, time or direction. Uncooperative transmitters are harder to localise compared to their cooperative counter-parts, for which Two-Way Ranging or other methods could be used [3] . When the waveform is unknown and accurate positioning over a large area is required, the commonly used methods are Angle of Arrival (AOA) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA). In this work, we focus on using TDOA as we aim to use robot swarms as movable passive reflectors. Our research question can be posed as follows: Can we use robot swarms as movable passive reflectors to enable TDOA- based localisation of an uncooperative transmitter?