Term 252

Cooperative UAV Swarm for Area Protection Against Hostile Drone

Project Type: Self-Initiated

Project Description

As the threat of hostile drones scales rapidly , current ground-based defense systems struggle to adapt due to high costs, lack of portability, and aerial blind spots. To address this gap, "Sky Guards" introduces a cooperative UAV swarm for area protection against hostile drones. Our solution is a portable aerial swarm that autonomously patrols, detects, and localizes unauthorized threats in real time using affordable hardware. Developed for 8500 SAR and deployable in five minutes , the prototype features a two-drone setup equipped with Jetson Nano Orin computers. The swarm is managed by a custom Ground Control Station (GCS) that utilizes a Shared Probability Grid Map to achieve optimal area coverage and ensure no blind spots anywhere on the grid. Onboard the UAVs, an optimized YOLO26 model processes both RGB and thermal modalities , achieving threat detection with under 50 ms of inference latency , a precision of 0.9585 , and an F1-score of 0.9491. By computing the spatial coordinates of the target using flight controller messages , the system successfully localizes the threat , paving the way for future integration with kinetic interception systems for automated threat neutralization.