Utilizations of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for both commercial and military sectors has recently emerged as promising technology. Due the ease of deployment and high manoeuvrability, UAVs are used in many applications, like environmental monitoring, disaster recovery, aerial photography, and aerial cellular data access. Specifically, we focus on the distributed radar imaging, beamforming and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication enabled by swarms.

In this project, we are developing several systems that utilize a swarm of cooperative UAVs to improve the communication and sensing capabilities. The ongoing projects are focusing on the following research challenges for distributed swarm communication: 1) Algorithm, protocol, and software defined radio implementation of timing and frequency synchronization among UAVs; 2) Novel distributed beamforming and MIMO processing at the UAV edge with reduced backhaul capacity requirements; 3) Optimal placement of UAVs that achieves a maximal cooperative communication throughput and its distributed implementation. For sensing applications, placement of UAVs provides more degree of freedom in the attempt to improve the image quality in radars and reduce the reconstruction errors.

Staff

• Primary Investigators: Danijela Čabrić
• Students: Han Yan, Samer Hanna, Yen-Chin Wang, and Enes Krijestorac

Selected publications

• S. Hanna, H. Yan, and D. Cabric, “UAV placement optimization in cooperative air-to-ground backhaul,” accepted to IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), May. 2019.
• H. Yan, S. Hanna, K. Balke, R. Gupta, and D. Cabric, “Software defined radio implementation of carrier and timing synchronization for distributed arrays,” to appear in Proc. IEEE Aerospace Conference (AeroConf), Mar. 2019.