Near-field beamforming method based on motion model analysis for UAVs communication

Abstract

This study presents a near-field beamforming method for the moving swarm composed of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to address the challenges of position errors that hinder effective beamforming. Firstly, a model with positional errors in moving UAVs was developed. The sources and characteristics of UAVs’ position errors were analyzed and classified into low-frequency motion errors and high-frequency vibration errors, and their effects on UAVs array beamforming were analyzed using coordinate transformation and decomposition. Secondly, a parameter estimation algorithm was proposed based on the Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) and the Least Square (LS) method to estimate the unknown parameters of the UAV's low-frequency motion errors. Lastly, a near-field beamforming algorithm for UAVs was proposed based on the Interpolation Kalman filter (IKF). The effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithms was verified through simulations, which provided a theoretical basis for the near-field beamforming under the existence of the UAVs position errors.