AUTO ANGULAR TRACKING OF UAV BASED ON MIXED PHASED/RETRODIRECTIVE ARRAY

A mixed phased array and retrodirective array providing auto tracking of the angular position of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is presented. The phase conjugation technique and complex vector multiplication are used together to find the geometric phase of each channel canceling the need to use direction finding algorithm (DOA). After generating the phase conjugated version of the received signal on each channel, its complex vector representation will be multiplied by the complex vector representation of the received signal on the reference channel. The UAV will stay on the beak of the array factor during its movement within the field of view (FOV), and a permanent high gain data link is obtained without the need of the tracking algorithm. The beamwidth of the resulted array is widened to be equal to the FOV. The computational cost of the tracking system will be reduced due to canceling the need of using the complex processing algorithms (DOA, and tracking) used in smart antenna. Direction finding algorithm, beamforming algorithm, and tracking algorithm are combined in one algorithm. The least square error pattern synthesis with nulls method is used to eliminate the predefined interference signals and add null steering ability to the resulted array. The effect of the phase errors is reduced to the case of single antenna due to including the phase errors of each channel in its complex weights. The beam pointing error is taken as a metric to evaluate the performance of the resulted array compared with the BPE of a phased array using the monopulse tracking method.