The Recent Advancement in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tracking Antenna: A Review

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) antenna tracking system is an electromechanical component designed to track and steer the signal beams from the ground control station (GCS) to the airborne platform for optimum signal alignment. In a tracking system, an antenna continuously tracks a moving target and records their position. A UAV tracking antenna system is susceptible to signal loss if omnidirectional antenna is deployed as the preferred design. Therefore, to achieve longer UAV distance communication, there is a need for directional high gain antenna. From design principle, directional antennas are known to focus their signal energy in a particular direction viewed from their radiation pattern which is concentrated in a particular azimuth direction. Unfortunately, a directional antenna is limited by angle, thus, it must always be directed to the target. The other limitation of a UAV mechanical beam steering system is that the system is expensive to maintain and with low reliability. To solve this problem, we are proposing the use of MIMO technology as a readily available technology for UAV beyond line of sight technology. Although UAV antenna tracking is domiciled in the mechanical beam steering arrangement, this study shows that this native technology could be usurped by MIMO beam forming.

Heterogeneous sensing for target tracking: architecture, techniques, applications and challenges

“…Due to the development of wireless charging technology, wireless rechargeable sensing systems have become a hot topic of research for scholars at present; such methods can prolong the life of a sensor system simply and effectively, with a wide range of recent literature addressing this topic [145,147,149,150]. • Future energy-saving strategies for heterogeneous sensing systems can be divided into two routes [154]. (i) Support for charging.…”

Moving Object Detection and Tracking by Event Frame from Neuromorphic Vision Sensors

“…Otherwise, we consider the object to be the wrong object. This article defines the ratio of the number of white pixels in the detection box to the total number of pixels as T, and the calculation formula is shown in Equation (7).…”

“…Intelligent agents such as robots, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), are widely used in military and civilian fields [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Object detection and tracking are very important to improve the autonomy of intelligent agents.…”

A novel elliptic trajectory formula for active RSSI-based antenna tracking algorithm

“…Due to high gain operation, tracking performance of AT is very critical for continuous air-to-ground (A2G) telemetry. The literature provides methods for performing this task using Global Positioning System (GPS) data, monopulse signal processing techniques, Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA), which measures the difference between the times detected by different receiver nodes and the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) value of the signal which is directly measured by multiple receiving antennas (Kelechi et al, 2021).…”