Experimental Demonstration of Distributed Beamforming on Two Flying Mini-Drones

Combing distributed small wireless systems on mobile platforms such as swarm airborne mini-drones has been explored recently. Localization and synchronization of the mobile drones are the main challenges limiting its practical applications. In this paper, we proposed a new approach to circumvent this limits by considering the drones as relay nodes, where the received signals are modulated to different frequencies and then re-transmitted to the final receiver for demodulation and beamforming. Real-time adaptive beamformer algorithm is used to compensate for the phase delay difference among drone elements in RF circuitry and in propagation paths caused by different drone elements positions. A beamforming array based on two-drones uses to demonstrate this concept. Improved signal to noise ratio (SNR) has been experimentally demonstrated with such beamforming approach. The proposed beamforming system architecture is expected to extend to a large of number distributed mini-drones for future wireless sensing and communication systems.