Novel Vector Sensors Design With Three Co-Located or Distributed Elements for the 3d Doa Estimation

Abstract

In this paper, two novel vector sensors using a reduced number of radiating elements are proposed to estimate the directions of arrival of incoming electromagnetic signals in the 3D space, azimuth and elevation angles. The first one uses co-located radiating elements while the other one is based on distributed antenna elements. These two sensors combine only two half-loops and one linear monopole placed on a metallic plate in view of embedded applications. Full wave electromagnetic simulations are performed to take into account the electromagnetic coupling effects between the antenna elements. The directions of arrival estimation accuracy of electromagnetic signals incoming in arbitrary directions in the full 3D space are computed from the MUSIC algorithm. For experimental validation purpose, a prototype is manufactured and the directions of arrival measurements are performed. Then a novel vector sensor design with a reduced number of antenna elements is presented. The antenna elements are spatially distributed. An analysis is carried out to determine the largest distance between the antenna elements without causing ambiguous estimations in the 3D space. The estimation accuracy of the resulting sensor is reported. Finally the performances of these two vector sensors are compared.

Tri-polarized Sparse Array Design for Mutual Coupling Reduction in Direction Finding and Polarization Estimation

“…A variety of approaches to parameter estimation with different types of VAs have been proposed in the literature; see, for instance, the work in [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. The design of multi-polarized VAs is also of interest for practical real-world parameter estimation, such as the work reported in [14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…An important problem in VA array signal parameter estimation is the alleviation of the intra-VA and inter-VA mutual coupling (MC) effects. For intra-VA MC reduction, one of the current measures is to develop a "distributed" ("stretched") VA whose constituent dipoles/loops are not spatially co-centered [10,[16][17][18]. Note that the approximate characteristics of an isolated VA (either co-located or distributed) involving MC can be also calculated via method of moments (MoM)-based full-wave electromagnetic simulations [21][22][23].…”

Grounded colocated antennas for wideband vector sensor applications

“…One active solution for frequencies below 30 MHz was reported in [2]. Based on [3], a dual-band vector sensor for embedded applications was reported using dual-band radiating elements [4].…”

Dual-Band Vector Sensor for Direction of Arrival Estimation of Incoming Electromagnetic Waves

“…In order to estimate the DoA of incoming EM-fields, the spatial phase diversity resulting from the spatial distribution of the sensor antennas [2] or the polarization diversity of the sensor [3] are usually used. The combination of these two well-known approaches has also been proposed to improve the accuracy of the DoA estimation [4]- [10]. The DoA estimation based on the spatial diversity consists of measuring the incoming EM-fields by using a single-polarized array of distributed elements whereas the use of the diversity of polarization is based on the measurement of the EM-field components by using, e.g., a vector sensor composed of six antennas: three orthogonal electric dipoles and three orthogonal magnetic dipoles [11].…”

“…The DoA estimation based on the spatial diversity consists of measuring the incoming EM-fields by using a single-polarized array of distributed elements whereas the use of the diversity of polarization is based on the measurement of the EM-field components by using, e.g., a vector sensor composed of six antennas: three orthogonal electric dipoles and three orthogonal magnetic dipoles [11]. Nevertheless, following [10], [12]- [18], the measurement of only three EM-field components seems to be sufficient for the accurate DoA estimation of transverse EM-fields in the three-dimensional (3-D) half-space. In [10], single-band vector sensors using only three co-located or distributed antennas are reported for estimating the DoA of incoming transverse magnetic (TM) EM-fields in the 3-D half-space.…”