Alignment and Tracking of a Free-Space Optical Communications Link to a UAV

Harris, Alan; Sluss, James J.; Refai, Hakki H.; LoPresti, Peter G.

doi:10.1109/dasc.2005.1563300

Cited by 44 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…The ATP mechanism is mainly divided into the following types, frame-based, mirror-based, frame-mirror hybrid, adaptive optics, liquid crystal, and RF/FSO hybrid [ 103 ]. With different scenarios, different ATPs will choose, for example, a larger pointing range is required for OWC between satellites and drones, whose communication link is the ATP mechanism of framework-based for its first choice [ 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 , 107 ]. However, because of the self-load of the rotating frame, this ATP mechanism is not suitable for the load limitation of small UAVs.…”

Section: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uav) Ground Terminal Optical Wimentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

Ding

Mei

Chih‐Lin

et al. 2020

Sensors

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With the continuous maturity of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in materials, communications, and other related technologies, the UAV industry has developed rapidly in recent years. In order to cope with the diversified emerging business forms, the explosive growth of the scale of data traffic, number of terminal connections, high reliability, low-latency, and high transmission rate provided by the fifth generation (5G) network will inject new vitality into the development of the UAVs industry. In this paper, optical wireless technology is introduced into the UAV platform, combining theory with practical applications. We explain many research advances and key technologies in the four aspects of “air, space, earth, and sea” to achieve a strong and broadband communication link. This discussion focuses on link modeling, parameter optimization, experimental testing, and the status quo of UAVs in different application scenarios with optical wireless link configurations. At the same time, based on the current situation of UAV optical wireless technology, the technical problems and the research direction in the future are also discussed.

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Section: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (Uav) Ground Terminal Optical Wimentioning

confidence: 99%

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

Ding

Mei

Chih‐Lin

et al. 2020

Sensors

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“…Regarding the implementation of an FSO link, however, we are faced to several practical problems. First, the stringent line-of-sight requirement necessitates careful pointing and probably some tracking mechanisms at the receiver [6,7]. Another important problem is the susceptibility of the optical link to weather conditions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Channel coding and time-diversity for optical wireless links

Xu¹,

Khalighi²,

Caussé³

et al. 2009

Opt. Express

134

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Atmospheric turbulence can cause a significant performance degradation in free space optical communication systems. An efficient solution could be to exploit the temporal diversity to improve the performance of the transmission link. Depending on the tolerable delay latency, we can benefit from some degree of time diversity that we can exploit by employing channel coding and interleaving. In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of several channel coding techniques for different time diversity orders and turbulence conditions. We show that a simple convolutional code is a suitable choice in most cases as it makes a good compromise between decoding complexity and performance. We also study the receiver performance when the channel is estimated based on some training symbols.

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“…A number of studies have examined misalignment mitigation [19][20][21][22], building sway [19,23], platform vibrations [24,25], and pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT) [14,[26][27][28] for fixed terrestrial FSO links. Some PAT algorithms have also been designed for use in satellite [29], air-to-air (A2A) [30], air-to-ground (A2G) [31] or ground-to-ground (G2G) [9,[32][33][34] mobile FSO links. However, all studied aerial platforms reported in the literature are either fixed wing aircrafts or highaltitude vehicles (HAL) that typically experience slow dynamics and require constant motion.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Multielement FSO Transceivers Alignment for Inter-UAV Communications

Kaadan

Refai

LoPresti

2014

J. Lightwave Technol.

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Given the increased interest in aerial communications, Free-space Optics (FSO) has gained considerable attention for its ability to deliver wider bandwidth, license-free and secure communication. FSO was initially developed for fixed platforms. As such, the current push to introduce mobility is one of the greatest challenges for FSO developers. This paper presents the first open-loop alignment/stability analysis of hovering multirotors proven to maintain an FSO link despite inherent instability. Communication distance, wavelength, and platform deviation are among the many parameters evaluated in our model. We characterize fiber-bundle transceivers, as an example of optical arrays, and their applicability to aerial FSO communication. Our simulation is based on static lab measurements combined with theoretical analysis and optical geometrical intersection models. Analyses indicated that rotational deviation has a much higher impact on performance than translational deviation. Current commercial multirotor platforms proved adequate for future FSO communication, with 16 to 30% expected throughput when employing suitable optical arrays. We conducted a parametric sweep test to determine optimal and marginal receiver parameters based on platform characteristics and performance metrics. This analysis was conducted and reported as one example of the many applications that our developed mathematical models support.

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Alignment and Tracking of a Free-Space Optical Communications Link to a UAV

Cited by 44 publications

References 4 publications

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

Frontier Progress of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Optical Wireless Technologies

Channel coding and time-diversity for optical wireless links

Multielement FSO Transceivers Alignment for Inter-UAV Communications

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