Drone and Controller Detection and Localization: Trends and Challenges

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a rapidly growing technology seeing unprecedented adoption in various application sectors due to their viability and low cost. However, UAVs have also been used to perform illegal and malicious actions, which have recently increased. This creates a need for technologies capable of detecting, classifying, and deactivating malicious and unauthorized drones. This paper reviews the trends and challenges of the most recent UAV detection methods, i.e., radio frequency-based (RF), radar, acoustic, and electro-optical, and localization methods. Our research covers different kinds of drones with a major focus on multirotors. The paper also highlights the features and limitations of the UAV detection systems and briefly surveys the UAV remote controller detection methods.