RSSI-Based Distributed Control to Align Directional Antenna Pairs for UAV Communication

In a scenario where two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are equipped with directional antennas for point-to-point communication, maintaining high-performance communication requires continuous adjustment of antenna orientations. This article presents a novel received signal strength indicator-based nonlinear static state feedback control law to achieve this under the unknown motions of the UAVs and the absence of global positioning system data. Our proposed method ensures convergence to the best orientation for almost all initial states of the closed-loop system when the UAVs are stationary. Furthermore, the closed-loop system achieves tracking of the best orientation with an error during motion. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in solving the directional antenna pair alignment problem.