Research on potential of sound-based direction sensing for drones

Precise guidance of the drone to the desired destination is one of the most challenging issues. Specifically, logistics services need more accurate localization. However, this issue is yet to be resolved in spite of many studies. In this paper, we propose an acoustic sensing scheme of a drone's direction with respect to an arbitrary observer. The frequency shift caused by the relative velocity between the observer and the sound source, Doppler's effect, is used to find the direction. Our experiment's results show the directionality can be found accurately. Also, the outdoor field experiment shows significantly better results than indoor tests. All experiments demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.