Experimental Comparison of UAV-Based RSSI and AoA Localization

Localization of ground transmitters using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a research field teeming with activity. While most experimental UAV-based localization systems in the literature use measures of signal strength, we take a novel approach, proposing an angle of arrival (AoA)-based system. We present a prototype that uses a 2 × 2 antenna array connected to a set of four coherent receivers based on software-defined radios. Furthermore, we provide a comparison of a classical RSSI-based ranging approach to a pure AoA-based approach using the 2-D distance ranging error as a common metric.