Development of An Array of Patch Antennas for Straightforward Beamforming Application

The use of autonomous vehicles that can navigate autonomously in factory rooms needs to be integrated with an accurate and reliable indoor positioning system (IPS). To support IPS system, an antenna, which is light in weight and ease to install on autonomous vehicles, is required. In this paper, an array development of patch antennas for straightforward beamforming application is presented. The antenna array which is designed on a 1.6 mm thickness FR4-Epoxy dielectric substrate consists of a four antenna patches with slot insertion slots near the edge of patch. The proposed 1×4 patch antenna array is designed to operate at a 2.4 GHz wireless local area network (WLAN) frequency band. The slot insertion on each patch provides a bandwidth improvement of 150 MHz within the frequency range of 2.38 GHz to 2.53 GHz. The coupling between the antenna patches in an array configuration is lower than −20 dB, whilst the gain of 8.91 dBi and 7.635 dBi are achieved at the frequency of 2.4 GHz and 2.45 GHz, respectively. Although the bandwidth improvement trades off with a non-uniform gain over the operating frequency, the proposed patch antenna array is still able to perform straightforward beamforming in the desired direction.