These are all artifacts from the Rincon Research Corporation's 2024 summer internship program in Tucson, which ran 10 weeks from May 28th - August 2nd.
When beginning the internship, we were given the general instructions to make a system to track drones via Remote ID and some initial components to try to accomplish that task. We ended up completing our initial system with one large station on week 4 and moved on to constructing smaller tracking nodes to address some issues with the range of our initial system as well as making many UI features.
Skysnare is a drone tracking system that consists of:
- a station with an omnidirectional antenna, directional antenna and camera that get pointed at the drone in flight
- smaller nodes that extend the range of the base larger station
- a web application that allows for monitoring of an area via a map and for the system to be controlled remotely
Below is a video of the larger station tracking a drone as it flies in front of it.
drone_flight.mp4
The system tracks the drones by utilizing Remote ID, a standard by the FAA requiring drones to broadcast their location via bluetooth and wifi as they are in flight.
My development was focused on the backend in Django and the web application in React. Utilizing websockets, I was able to connect the station to Django hosted on AWS, then to our web application. All of the captured drone and station data was also stored in an SQLite database as it went through Django, as well as one camera frame per second. One of the larger features I developed on the web app was the playback mode. This allowed the user to select a time window and go through the window to see historical drone movements detected by our system.
Here is a demo of the playback mode utilizing data from the test seen above: