3DSAR: A Single-Drone 3D Cellular Search and Rescue Solution Leveraging 5G- NR

Andra Blaga, Federico Campolo, Maurizio Rea, Xavier Costa-Pérez

Abstract: Every year millions of lives are lost in emergency situations. Finding missing people in the shortest possible time is the most effective tool to reduce such a death toll. However, this is challenging when victims are unable to communicate by themselves, located in large areas and/or difficult to reach. In this paper we present 3DSAR, a single-drone 3D cellular search-and-rescue solution, leveraging on 5G-new radio (NR), able to estimate the location of people through their mobile phones. Our novel 3DSAR design consists of 4 main components to improve the localization accuracy of state-of-the-art drone-based cellular localization solutions: i) distance estimator, ii) angles estimator, iii) 3D positioning, and iv) 3D unnamed aerial vehicles (UAV) prediction trajectory algorithm. Our results show that 3DSAR improves by an order of magnitude the positioning error of current single-drone solutions thanks to its dynamic 3D trajectory control.