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

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

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

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