All-Around Beam Switched Antenna with Dual Polarization for Drone Communications

This communication presents a drone-to-drone adaptive beam switched antenna with 360° beam coverage and dual polarizations. The proposed antenna maintains the all-around beam coverage with high directivity based on 16 concentric planar Yagi-Uda dipole array. The high gain dipole array beams are configured by eight vertical polarization elements and eight horizontal polarization elements with directors and reflectors. Depending on various communication environments, a single beam, multiple beams with identical polarization, or multiple beams with different polarizations can be adaptively controlled for highly reliable drone-to-drone communication. To ensure the compactness in the antenna array, 16 concentric planar antenna elements are arranged in an orthogonally crossed manner with optimized vertical and horizontal transition matching circuits. Each Yagi-Uda dipole element for vertical or horizontal polarization showed a measured peak gain of 6.35 and 6.40 dBi at 5.5 GHz, respectively. The proposed antenna was integrated with sub-6 GHz transceiver and microcontroller unit (MCU) to verify the switched beam performance with dual polarization. Also, the Tx and Rx operation at random beam conditions was tested by using two proposed antennas and showed an excellent performance from 5 to 6 GHz.