Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s), also known as autonomous drones, are being utilized for a variety of applications such as disaster management, search and rescue, surveillance, and remote monitoring. The wireless link to transfer the data from the drone to the ground station or another drone is critical for such applications. Antenna, being the most important part of that wireless link, must be designed such that it seamlessly integrates with the drone without affecting its flight. This means the antenna must be thin, lightweight, conformal, and provide wide coverage. On the other hand, antenna’s performance must not be deteriorated due to UAV mounting, so antennas with ground planes are preferred. Further, to cater for high data rate applications, a large bandwidth is required, which is difficult to achieve on thin substrates. In this paper, a dual band design is presented that addresses all the key requirements for a drone antenna. Specifically, the bandwidth is enhanced without increasing the substrate thickness. The proposed dual-mode antenna demonstrates one of the largest bandwidths (4% at 2.4 GHz and 7% at 5.2 GHz) on a thin substrate ( $0.0128~\lambda _{0}$ ) and presents one of the highest gain (~10dBi) in comparison to the published UAV antennas. It is shown that the antenna’s performance does not deteriorate for moderate bending conditions. Finally, a 3-element triangular multiple input multiple output (MIMO) configuration is designed and seamlessly integrated with the UAV body to demonstrate its efficacy.
Highlights
In the last decade, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have received considerable attention from industries to provide services for a number of applications such as drones photography, mapping, surveillance, search and rescue, wild-life monitoring, precision agriculture, shipping, and delivery, etc
Antenna Bending Performance To see the antenna performance in different bending conditions, the antenna is bent in 3 bending angles viz. 8, 18 and 30 degrees as depicted in Fig 20(a) to accommodate a typical curvature of UAV’s body
Our antennas can be mounted on wings or fuselage of UAV
Summary
UAVs have received considerable attention from industries to provide services for a number of applications such as drones photography, mapping, surveillance, search and rescue, wild-life monitoring, precision agriculture, shipping, and delivery, etc. Printed/conformal monopoles can provide a decent impedance bandwidths and can be be designed for multiband operations their characteristics i.e. resonant frequency sometimes changes while mounted on a drones body. Conformal monopole designs with full ground plane [4, 6] suffer in terms of the realized bandwidths and higher thickness (typically 10-18 mm) that requires significant recess of drone’s body material to have seamless integration. We can see that the proposed antenna exhibits one of the largest bandwidths for both the bands despite being on one of the thinnest substrate It demonstrates one of the highest gain and diverse radiation patterns that will lead to large communication range and wide radiation coverage. The antenna being thin and conformal, can be seamlessly integrated with the UAV body without any deterioration in performance due to bending or UAV body effect
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