Using a Drone Formation with Sectored Antennas in Search-And-Rescue: Heuristics for Orienting Drones and Moving the Formation

Recently there has been interest in using drones/unmanned aerial vehicles in search-and-rescue applications. Here we apply a formation of drones equipped with sectorised antennae to navigate to a transmitter using Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation to navigate. We present results indicating that the error of the DoA estimate is dependent on the DoA and evaluate a mitigation technique, finding that incrementally changing the drone orientation across the formation reduces the DoA estimation error. Further, we investigate a “dumbbell” formation in which the two “weights” generate independent DoA estimates, the difference between which are used to broadly classify the distance to the transmitter. We found that the choice of distance thresholds and relative direction of the transmitter substantially changes the performance of this distance heuristic.