New BYU research aiming to do what FAA can’t — track low-flying drones

The proliferation of small aerial drones continues at a breakneck pace across the U.S., along with a growing list of sightings in restricted airspace, close encounters and incidents involving dangerous interactions with both piloted aircraft and other drones.

But new radar-based drone tracking technology developed by a team of BYU researchers could represent a game-changing first step toward managing the emerging and increasingly congested realm of overhead air traffic.

Following a series of drone sightings in and around protected airspace in the skies over New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania late last year, the Defense Department issued a December press release noting there are more than 1 million recreational and commercial drones registered in the U.S. The actual number, however, is likely much higher, as not all small aircraft make it to the list, including vehicles under the 0.55-pound cutoff for required registration.

The number of registered drones far outpaces the U.S.-based civil aircraft fleet which currently numbers about 215,000.

The pattern is filling up

In December, a Fruit Heights resident told KSL.com she saw “about 10″ aircraft she believed were drones over Hill Air Force Base one evening. A Hill spokesperson later confirmed there were drones flying in the area of the base, which prohibits activity without a permit within a 5-mile radius of the facility.

“We can confirm that unmanned aerial systems were spotted in the vicinity of (Hill Air Force Base) recently,” spokesperson Kendahl Johnson told KSL. “To date, unmanned aerial systems have not impacted (Hill Air Force Base) operations, and all appropriate measures are being taken to safeguard (Hill) personnel, assets and infrastructure.”

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, reports of unmanned aircraft sightings from pilots, citizens and law enforcement continues to grow and the agency currently receives more than 100 such reports near airports each month.

The Salt Lake City Department of Airports reported nine drone sightings in 2024 at facilities it oversees, which include Salt Lake City International Airport as well as South Valley Regional and Tooele Valley airports. None of those sightings were considered “incidents,” however, and three of the reports were of authorized drone use.

Why drones are so hard to track

According to a report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies, the FAA is responsible for integrating unmanned aerial systems operations into the National Airspace System, which is the air traffic control service managing over 45,000 flights per day across the almost 30 million square miles of U.S. airspace.

The analysis notes that drones are difficult to track using traditional radar systems, which best track objects with large radar cross sections and at higher altitudes than ones at which unmanned aerial systems typically operate.

While airport radar systems sometimes can detect drones, they might mistake those objects for birds, since radar alone cannot classify detected objects. Drones' ability to fly erratically and quickly change speeds, as well as operate in large groups or swarms, like many birds, also makes them more difficult to track using traditional radar, according to the report.

BYU’s innovative, low-cost solution

And that’s where the work of BYU engineering professor Cammy Peterson and a team of fellow researchers comes into play.

Using a network of small, custom-designed, low-cost radars, Peterson and her colleagues built an air traffic control system for drones that can effectively and accurately track anything in an identified low-altitude (sub-400 feet) airspace. Peterson co-authored a paper on the research published recently in the Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems.

Here’s an overview of how the system works:

• Multiple ground station computers are connected to radar units, which are distributed around an area.
• The radar units are pointed toward the sky to detect any moving objects within their field of view.
• When a radar unit identifies an object, it records the position of that object in addition to the radar unit itself.
• This information is then converted to a global coordinate frame to be shared with other ground stations to create a comprehensive, time-varying picture of air traffic in the area.

In a Deseret News interview, Peterson noted a system based on the new research could be deployed and integrated with airport tracking radar to help avoid interactions between drones and piloted aircraft. It could also be used to ensure that the increasing number of drones, including commercial operations that are already plying the skies over some Utah communities, can maintain safe operations.

“Certainly one of the use cases could apply to package delivery where a bunch of different companies are sharing the same air space,” Peterson said. “The system could deconflict the shared space, and provide situational awareness for commercial drone operators including tracking where hobbyist-operated aircraft are flying.”

Drone package delivery services have been flying in Utah since 2022 and companies including Intermountain Health and Walmart operate in South Jordan, Herriman and Lindon.

Peterson, whose specialties include tracking and multi-vehicle motion coordination, said a big part of the research work involved creating new algorithms that mesh the viewing space of the small radars together in a “common frame” and fine tunes the units' ability to recognize and track the movement of drones, even very small ones, and discern the aircraft from other airborne “noise” like birds.

So far, the system has only been tested in a controlled, small-scale setting, but Peterson said it was designed to be scaled up and could be deployed in a multitude of settings, including civilian or military air field operations or even on cell towers in rural or residential areas to track, for example, package delivery drones.

“One company ... can’t take the whole airspace for an hour, right?” Peterson said. “To be cost effective you need to allow multiple vehicles from different companies to travel through the same area during the same time window. If you want to be safe, you’ll want to know where the other drones are at.”

On top of innovating new drone tracking technology, the BYU research, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, also developed a system that would be very cost-effective to deploy.

“Radar has been around for a long time,” Karl Warnick, study co-author and BYU professor of electrical and computer engineering, said in a statement. “Instead of having a $10 million spinning dish like you’d see at an airport, we have a simple thing that could be built for a few hundred dollars. The small radars don’t have all the capabilities of a higher-end radar, but a network of small radars can work together effectively.”