Communication Link Budget using Quadcopters

This is an archive site. Current senoir design projects are at https://projects.eng.uci.edu.

Submitted by banhl on Mon, 09/26/2016 - 13:22

Topic:

URL to Weekly Blog: https://sites.google.com/uci.edu/squadcopter/home_1

URL to Project Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFKehvqr2o0

Faculty Mentor: Lee Swindlehurst - expert in sensor array signal processing for radar and wireless communications, detection and estimation theory, and system identification

Industry Mentor: Jeffrey Yang - expert in communications systems and a manager at Northrop Grumman

Team sQUADcopter: Linda Banh, Pino Cao, Yan Huang, Matt Butrovich

Idea Source: Northrop Grumman (working in collaboration with this company)

The objective of the senior design project is to construct and validate an airborne communication link model via over-the-air measurement, taking into account parameters such as altitude, observation angle, and atmospheric attenuation.

The proposed approach consists of using a quad copter to emulate the airborne platform carrying a radio that can vary frequency of operation.  The design project includes air vehicle resource optimization (e.g. battery power, payload weight) to maximize loitering time for the experiment.  To measure the signal strength as a function of altitude/angle/frequency, the team plans to construct a ground station using existing test equipment.  The data collected will then be compare against the Matlab communication link model output to verify the accuracy of the prediction.