Adaptive Beamforming for Tele-operated Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Tactical tele-operated mobile robots are increasingly used in the military and law-enforcement for applications where robots can take the place of human operators. This is especially true for explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) operators who can use robots to defeat improvised explosive devices (IEDs). For EOD applications, the sufficient standoff between the operator and the robot is critical to the safety of the operator. This paper presents a beamforming array that provides constant line-of-sight (LOS) communications between the operator and the tele-operated robot. The development of the adaptive beamforming communications system is presented. It is shown that through the use of the newly developed system, a 1.6x range improvement is obtained as compared to using a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) system.