Design and Optimization of UAV Swarm-Based Phased Arrays for Near-Isotropic Full Scan Range

This paper introduces a novel distributed aperiodic phased array based on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm with rotated antenna elements designed to generate a near-isotropic scanned radiation pattern with high aperture efficiency. The positions of UAV-mounted elements and the rotation angles of each antenna are optimized using a genetic algorithm (GA) to minimize variation in gain, half power bandwidth (HPBW), and peak sidelobe level (PSLL) over steered angles to ensure isotropic scanned beam. Rotated dipole antenna elements are expected to achieve near-isotropic radiation performance similar to an ideal point source array, and much better performance than traditional conformal arrays. Simulated and experimental characterizations validate the feasibility of the design, with measurement results showing peak-to-peak (pk-pk) of 2.9 dB, 0.25°, and 1.84 dB for gain, HPBW, and PSLL, respectively, across the full steered range. This antenna array holds potential applications in radar systems, air traffic control, satellite-to-ground communication, and 5G communication.