Fusion of Cellular ISAC and Passive RF Sensing for UAV Detection and Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dickerson, Cole, Kearney, Sean, Manjur, Sultan, Guvenc, Ismail, Gurbuz, Sevgi, Gurbuz, Ali, Ozdemir, Ozgur, Sichitiu, Mihail
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dickerson, Cole
Kearney, Sean
Manjur, Sultan
Guvenc, Ismail
Gurbuz, Sevgi
Gurbuz, Ali
Ozdemir, Ozgur
Sichitiu, Mihail
author_facet Dickerson, Cole
Kearney, Sean
Manjur, Sultan
Guvenc, Ismail
Gurbuz, Sevgi
Gurbuz, Ali
Ozdemir, Ozgur
Sichitiu, Mihail
contents The rapid growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian and critical-infrastructure airspace has created a need for reliable detection and tracking systems that operate under diverse environmental and sensing conditions. This paper presents a UAV detection and tracking system that fuses measurements from a network of passive Keysight N6841A RF sensors and a Ku-band Fortem TrueView R20 radar operating in the FR3 spectrum (16.3 GHz) as an ISAC proxy. Real-world experiments at the NSF AERPAW testbed demonstrate that radar and RF sensing provide complementary strengths under varying geometric, range, and line-of-sight conditions. A Kalman filter using a constant-velocity motion model integrates the asynchronous 2D RF and 3D radar observations, suppressing large standalone errors, improving accuracy over individual modalities, and increasing tracking coverage without degrading performance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal, ISAC-oriented sensing for robust UAV tracking in outdoor environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fusion of Cellular ISAC and Passive RF Sensing for UAV Detection and Tracking
Dickerson, Cole
Kearney, Sean
Manjur, Sultan
Guvenc, Ismail
Gurbuz, Sevgi
Gurbuz, Ali
Ozdemir, Ozgur
Sichitiu, Mihail
Signal Processing
The rapid growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civilian and critical-infrastructure airspace has created a need for reliable detection and tracking systems that operate under diverse environmental and sensing conditions. This paper presents a UAV detection and tracking system that fuses measurements from a network of passive Keysight N6841A RF sensors and a Ku-band Fortem TrueView R20 radar operating in the FR3 spectrum (16.3 GHz) as an ISAC proxy. Real-world experiments at the NSF AERPAW testbed demonstrate that radar and RF sensing provide complementary strengths under varying geometric, range, and line-of-sight conditions. A Kalman filter using a constant-velocity motion model integrates the asynchronous 2D RF and 3D radar observations, suppressing large standalone errors, improving accuracy over individual modalities, and increasing tracking coverage without degrading performance. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal, ISAC-oriented sensing for robust UAV tracking in outdoor environments.
title Fusion of Cellular ISAC and Passive RF Sensing for UAV Detection and Tracking
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14608