SonicNudge: Controlled Displacement of Hovering UAVs via Estimator-Controller Coupling

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25319v2
• Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:05:33 GMT
• Title: SonicNudge: Controlled Displacement of Hovering UAVs via Estimator-Controller Coupling
• Abstract summary: SonicNudge is an attack primitive that transforms low-level inertial errors into controlled displacement of hovering or slow-moving UAVs.<n>This behavior is especially relevant to UAV tasks that require hovering, station-keeping, slow approach, or precise final alignment.
• Score: 11.293063979196434
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: UAV displacement attacks have traditionally relied on spoofing sensors that directly report position or translational motion, such as GNSS and optical flow. In this work, we introduce SonicNudge, a new attack primitive that instead targets the gyroscope and shows that low-level inertial errors can be transformed into controlled displacement of hovering or slow-moving UAVs. The attack exploits estimator--controller coupling: a small gyroscope perturbation by ultrasonic resonance can persist as an attitude-estimation bias, and the flight controller can convert this biased estimate into a shifted hover point. This behavior is especially relevant to UAV tasks that require hovering, station-keeping, slow approach, or precise final alignment, such as perimeter denial, inspection, docking, landing alignment, and close-proximity operation, where meter-scale position errors can be operationally meaningful. We analyze this attack primitive in a PX4-style flight stack and validate it through 81 simulation runs and more than 10 indoor/outdoor physical experiments, showing that displacement is governed by estimator weighting, bias observability, and closed-loop position correction. Our study suggests that UAV and vehicle-system security should look beyond direct navigation spoofing and pay closer attention to low-level inertial errors and estimator--controller coupling as a subtle but important attack surface.

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