A Dual Mode, Thin and Wideband MIMO Antenna System for Seamless Integration on UAV

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.