Radio beacon system

Abstract

A radio beacon system configured to assist autonomous flight of one or more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), wherein the radio beacon system comprises: - a drone device (200), configured to be installed on an UAV and including a radio transceiver, and - a radio beacon device (100), configured to be installed on ground and including N antenna arrays (110, 120) with N >= 2, one or more radio transceivers configured to communicate with the radio transceiver of the drone device (200), and at least one processing unit (130), wherein each antenna array (110, 120) has M antenna elements (115, 125) with M >= 2 associated to respective beamforming electronic weights w(n, m), with n ranging from 1 to N and m ranging from 1 to M, wherein said at least one processing unit (130) is configured to perform an adaptive beamforming method for assisting autonomous flight of the UAV.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates to a system of radio beacons and radio beacons that can facilitate the autonomous flight of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, in an efficient, reliable, versatile, extremely accurate and inexpensive manner A related approach, the system requires low environmental and visual impact because the necessary equipment requires low energy, involves low power radio frequency emissions, has a limited size that easily adapts to the environment (and can be hidden in the environment). Background technique [0002] What is known is that, although originally developed for military applications, over the past few decades drones have been increasingly used in civilian applications such as surveillance, inspection, package delivery, pilot training, gaming and Hobby. In particular, applications in infrastructure are investment monitoring, inspection, maintenance and asset inventory, in this context for inspection of tr...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

[0007] However, such prior art solutions have some disadvantages, mainly due to the fact that UAV applications in particular require a higher spatial resolution than achieved by prior art techniques and also delimit areas rather than individual point capacity

Furthermore, prior art solutions involve complex structures and processing techniques, which are therefore expensive and often require extremely high transmit power levels, making such solutions infeasible for widespread UAV applications

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