Parametric Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Antenna Arrays

Recent advances in development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based antenna arrays prompted this research to study the effect of mounted antenna array’s radiation pattern in pitch, yaw, and roll movement for UAVs like drones (quadcopter herein) for phased array applications. This paper brings out the various array design constraints and the effect of the 3D position of array elements plus swarm of quadcopter system forming an airborne antenna array. The sensitivity of array’s interelement spacing for making the desired formation of quadcopter cluster to produce desired radiation pattern performance over the hemisphere is analyzed. A qualitative assessment of airborne antenna array is presented using a commercial method of moment-based electromagnetics solver, Altair Feko.