Friday, January 15, 2010

Swarm MIMO and cognitive antenna creation on the "Fly"


Looking at the skybotix and talking to folks in the lab about GPS jammer direction of arrival and null-steering to locate and isolate jammer - I considered building a flock bot to produce reconfigurable GPS antijamming arrays. The GPS antennas are typically omni-directional and pick up the signal as well as strong jammers. A flock antenna can easily locate jammers by producing spherical antenna arrays on demand to detect and null jammers. A perfect example of what a group of objects can do when individuals fail. The 3D array configuration can then change from detection mode to nulling mode where the array reforms to steer the most effcient nulls. The whole swarm gains by receiving GPS position and sharing the information via difficult to jam short-distance communication such as bluetooth.

The tricky bits now would be to build the relocation and swarm shaping without collision. The swarm has to collectively agree on the position of the elements and plan paths while observing the RF environment. Sounds tricky but if bees can do it, we can too.

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