The Helicopter-based Aerial Wireless Kit (HAWK) is a war-flying tool. It is more accurate than a war-walking or war-driving tool. Since HAWK can fly to any point in open space, we can set up an airborne Kismet with GPS on HAWK and produce a fine-grained geographical map of wireless access points (APs) or routers. War-driving and war-walking tools are not able to provide such location granularity since it is not possible for cars and not convenient for people to access dead ends such as building roofs.

HAWK can also be used for search, rescue, and surveillance. It is able to sense a mobile target through its wireless signals, either cellular or WiFi. For instance, modern smartphones are often equipped with WiFi devices, which send out probing signals intermittently. When we search and rescue a lost traveler or a survivor from building debris after an earthquake, we can position her by localizing her active smartphone via HAWK flying slowly at a low altitude. HAWK can also fly in the vertical plane around a skyscraper to search for a suspect hiding in a room and committing attacks via WiFi. The top diameter of HAWK is only 99 cm and its height is 25.4 cm. It can fly both outdoors and indoors and conduct stunts that common large helicopters cannot do.

News

  • Zhongli Liu and Yinjie Chen won the silver medal at the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at ACM MobiCom 2011 with "HAWK: An Unmanned Mini Helicopter-based Aerial Wireless Kit for Search, Rescue and Surveillance" in Sep. 2011.

Publications

  • Z. Liu, Y. Chen, B. Liu, C. Cao, and Xinwen Fu, HAWK: An unmanned mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit for localization, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2012, Accepted.
  • Z. Liu, Y. Chen, B. Liu, C. Cao, and Xinwen Fu, HAWK: An unmanned mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit for localization, in Proceedings of Infocom , 2012, Accept ratio: 18%.
  • Zhongli Liu, Yinjie Chen, Benyuan Liu, Jie Wang, Xinwen Fu, Aerial Localization with Smartphone, in Proceedings of The 7th International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA), 2012

Video Demonstration