Soft Robotics-Inspired Flexible Antenna Arrays

Abstract: In this work, a novel soft continuum robot-inspired antenna array is proposed, featuring tentacle-like structures with multiple antenna elements. The proposed array achieves reconfigurability through continuous deformation of its geometry, in contrast to reconfigurable antennas which incur a per-element control. More specifically, the deformation is modeled by amplitude and spatial frequency parameters. We consider a multi-user multiple-input single-output downlink system, whereby the optimal deformation parameters are found to maximize the sum rate in the network. A successive convex approximation method is adopted to solve the problem. Numerical results show that the proposed deformable array significantly outperforms fixed geometry and per-element reconfigurable arrays in sum rate, demonstrating the benefits of structure-level flexibility for next-generation antenna arrays.