Project: Ultra-thin conformal antennas for UAV’s

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), 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 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. To provide a plug-and-play solution, the antenna’s performance must not be deteriorated due to the UAV mounting.  Further, to cater for high data rate applications, a large bandwidth is required, which is difficult to achieve with thin substrates. In this project, a thin, conformal antenna system is designed and developed for a long-range HD video transmission where the antenna can be attached to the drone’s body on demand like a sticker. Additionally, antennas radiation pattern diversity is useful to extend the communication range and a dual-band feature could be used to maintain the communication in presence of interference or jammers.