Abstract

Drones have carried weapons, drugs, explosives and illegal packages in the recent past, raising strong concerns from public authorities. While existing drone monitoring systems only focus on detecting drone presence, localizing or !ngerprinting the drone, there is a lack of a solution for estimating the additional load carried by a drone. In this paper, we present a novel passive RF system, namely DroneScale, to monitor the wireless signals transmitted by commercial drones and then con!rm their models and loads. Our key technical contribution is a proposed technique to passively capture vibration at high resolution (i.e., 1Hz vibration) from afar, which was not possible before. We prototype DroneScale using COTS RF components and illustrate that it can monitor the body vibration of a drone at the targeted resolution. In addition, we develop learning algorithms to extract the physical vibration of the drone from the transmitted signal to infer the model of a drone and the load carried by it. We evaluate the DroneScale system using 5 di”erent drone models, which carry external loads of up to 400g.