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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have witnessed widespread adoption in the modern world, with their development set to continue into the future. As UAV technology and applications advance, it becomes imperative to understand their communication capabilities. UAVs experience distinct radio propagation conditions compared to ground-based radio nodes, necessitating a critical investigation into aerial radio node performance. This paper analyzes interference in UAV-to-UAV (U2U) communications within drone corridors and proposes an interference mitigation strategy utilizing millimeter wave (mmWave) beamforming. Employing a semi-persistent scheduling approach from the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) sidelink communications for low altitude aerial nodes in drone corridors, the study primarily examines interference from drone clusters within designated air corridors. To assess U2U communication performance, a 3GPP standard-compliant cross-layer simulator is developed. Simulation results demonstrate that employing mmWave beamforming instead of isotropic transmission substantially reduces interference, leading to higher communications reliability and enabling more UAVs to occupy and communicate in the airspace.
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Testing and Evaluation of Radio Frequency Immunity of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles For Bridge Inspection
Recent technological advances have led to an increase in the adoption of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a variety of use-case scenarios. In particular, Departments of Transportation in several states in the United States have been exploring the use of UAVs for bridge and infrastructure inspections to improve safety and reduce the costs of the inspection process. UAVs are remotely piloted from a cockpit or a ground station via radio channels. The UAV's state information and payload information are also transmitted to the cockpit/ground station via radio frequency (RF) signals. The RF channels that are commonly used by most UAVs are 72-73, 902-928 and 2400-2483.5 MHz bands, which is also shared by several other communication protocols such as, WiFi and ZigBee networks, and therefore, the interference effects with the other services on the UAV's operation performance cannot be overlooked, particularly to maintain the minimum distance from the close by surfaces while flying alongside and underneath the bridges to achieve the best results. The loss of signal or even signal strength during such close flights can cause damage to the UAV. Especially while inspecting the bridges located in the urban areas that involve a lot of RF communication around due to presence of sever RC devices providing different services. Conventional Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) adherence requirements imposed on electronic systems are not adequate for UAVs due to their airborne nature and the presence of the other RF sources in the environment. Thus, in this work, we investigate the compliance of EMC requirements by designing and conducting field experiments to expose the UAVs to electromagnetic interference and distortions that are likely to be encountered during the UAV operation. The results of this work will enable us to assess the level of RF immunity of the general-purpose UAVs to aid in the selection of a suitable UAV platform for bridge inspection and develop safety procedures for minimizing the impact of RF interference.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1832110
- PAR ID:
- 10326307
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE Aerospace Conference
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO50100.2021.9438457
