Finding Radio Transmissions with Drones

MIT Lincoln Laboratory Engineering, 2022–23

Liaison(s): Joey Botero, Alexia Schulz, Sage Trudeau, Richard Gentile, Kent Lundberg
Advisor(s): Matthew Spencer (S), David Harris (F)
Students(s): Ava Fascetti (TL-S), Kip Macsai-Goren (TL-F), Melis Baltan-Brunet, Miles Cook, Martin Susanto, Diego Herrera Vicioso

The MIT Lincoln Laboratory Clinic team is designing, building and testing a drone carrying a software-defined radio to detect and characterize radio-frequency signals that would otherwise be undetectable from the ground. The end goal is a flight test in which a drone autonomously determines the position of one or more radio transmitters on the ground. This work builds on a Clinic project from last year, extending work on hardware and algorithm selection.