Directional Antenna Prediction Control System for Stable Communication of Small Unmanned Surface Vehicle

Abstract

Although Wi-Fi has the best versatility and provides relatively fast bandwidth, it has problems that the obstacle transmittance is low and the communication speed above a certain level is ensured only when LOS is guaranteed. MR-SENTINEL, a marine unmanned ship transmits image information for remote control of an unmanned ship and monitoring of maritime environment by using WiFi directional antenna in order to reduce operating cost and to extend coverage. However, since a small marine unmanned ship has frequent Pitch, Roll, Sway situation due to wave, when a directional antenna is used, it is necessary to cope with the pitching and rolling through a horizontal balancing device such as a jimbol to provide a stable bandwidth, and an antenna rotator is required to maintain the direction of the directional antenna during the situation of Sway and the movement. In this paper, we designed and implemented a directional antenna predication control system to provide a stable communication environment of WiFi directional antenna used in small unmanned ships and verified the performance through field experiments.