Positional Perturbations Analysis for Micro-UAV Array With Relative Position-Based Formation

Recently, micro-UAV swarm-based antenna arrays have been exploited as a novel solution to support sensing and communication applications. However, positional perturbations represent a challenge while deploying the micro-UAV swarm, which may cause deterioration of the UAV array spatial spectrum and limit the array aperture to coherently resolve a target. This letter studies the impacts of positional errors on the direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation and spatial spectrum of the micro-UAV swarm-based array deployed according to the relative position-based formation, where the perturbations of one UAV may be inherited by its following UAVs. Additionally, we study the beamforming of the micro-UAV swarm-based antenna array either with and without the beamformers' power constraint. Moreover, asymptotic performance has been examined with massive number of micro-UAVs. Several important insights are gained, and are verified through numerical simulations.