Project SCOUT: Interceptor Drone for Perimeter Defense

2026-09-17

AI Summary

为应对未经授权的无人机威胁，SCOUT系统通过集成ROS的机载感知与控制框架，实现无需外部设施支持的实时防御。

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has created a growing need for robust, jamming-resistant counter-UAV systems for perimeter defense. This paper presents \textbf{SCOUT} (Spatial Computation for Optimized UAV Tracking), a ROS-integrated onboard perception and control framework for real-time aerial defense against incoming UAVs. SCOUT performs visual detection, target association, track filtering, and control command generation directly onboard the defender UAV, without relying on external sensing infrastructure or ground-station computation. To provide stable control inputs, the perception pipeline combines TensorRT-accelerated drone detection with ByteTrack-based association and a lightweight track-retention state machine. The state machine rejects abrupt target jumps and maintains short-term target continuity during temporary detection degradation, reducing unstable control responses caused by false detections or target switching. We evaluate the proposed architecture through an integrated hardware deployment executing a planar ``goalkeeping'' interception strategy. In this setting, the defender UAV tracks the incoming target and adjusts its motion to maintain a blocking configuration near the protected boundary. Real-world flight results show that SCOUT maintains valid target detections for 92.2\% of frames while operating at real-time onboard detection rates, demonstrating the feasibility of visual tracking and closed-loop control for UAV perimeter defense. A video demonstration of the end-to-end perimeter defense operation is available online. https://figshare.com/s/497befc033091fc0b84f

Problem

• unauthorized UAVs
• perimeter defense
• jamming-resistant
• counter-UAV systems

Innovation

• SCOUT
• onboard perception and control
• TensorRT
• ByteTrack
• real-time aerial defense