Low-Cost Beamforming Concept for the Control of Radiation Patterns of Antenna Arrays Installed onto UAVs

Abstract

This paper presents a low-cost architecture that allows for beamforming with antenna arrays installed onto unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Beam switching is proposed to improve the antenna gain towards the ground station with two three-element arrays installed below the wings of the UAV. The electromagnetic modeling of the complete structure (UAV and integrated antennas) was performed with commercial electromagnetic simulator Ansys HFSS. The radiation patterns were synthesized with particle swarm optimization (PSO). By employing lumped surface-mount device (SMD) components and switches, the design of the feeder to deliver proper excitation coefficients to the antennas is presented, and its performance was assessed by simulations. The proposed approach is demonstrated to be very effective with low-cost production.