Faculty and students in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering will use an $849,839 grant from the National Science Foundation to improve unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) communications, with the potential to enable the next wave of drone applications ranging from delivery of consumer goods to supporting autonomous combat and search and rescue efforts.
The award to Joseph Camp and Dinesh Rajan in the Electrical Engineering Department begins funding their work October 1, 2018, and will extend through September 30, 2021. The objective is to build infrastructure for Multi-Dimensional Drone Communications Infrastructure (MuDDI) to address research issues related to three-dimensional connectivity, distributed antennas across a drone swarm and 3-D swarm formations that optimize the transmission to intended receivers.
The SMU team will rent and equip indoor space relatively close to campus for repeatable experimentation. “This will allow us to run our experiments in a controlled environment with the ability to precisely measure the wireless transmission characteristics,” Camp said.
The drone research could have far-reaching applications for the future of UAV communications, including increasing Internet connectivity during natural disasters as well as commercial and military applications, all of which require coordination of multiple entities across various altitudes, from in-flight to ground-based stations. Potential applications also include deploying WiFi in underserved, low-income neighborhoods.
Read more at SMU Research.