Beamforming Performance for a Reconfigurable Sparse Array Smart Antenna System via Multiple Mobile Robotic Systems

摘要

This paper describes and evaluates the beamforming performance for a flexible sparse array smart antenna system that can be reconfigured through the use of multiple mobile robots. Current robotic systems are limited because they cannot utilize beamforming due to their limited number of antennas and the high computational requirement of beamformers. The beamforming techniques used in this paper are unique because unlike current beamformers, the antennas in the sparse array are not connected together; instead, each robot has a single antenna. This work is made possible through breakthroughs by the authors on ultra-low computational complexity beamforming and multi-mobile robot cluster control. This new beamforming paradigm provides spatial reconfigurability of the array to control its location, size, inter-antenna spacing and geometry via multi-robot collaborative communications. Simulation results evaluate the effectiveness of smart antenna beamforming techniques when 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 robots are utilized with and without interference signals present.