Video Transcript

Hello, I’m Matthew Vincie. I’m a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. I am working on a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology. My specialty is guidance, navigation, and control and I also have the secondary specialty in unmanned aerial systems. I was studying radio frequency propagation and antennae modeling to be used in an airborne environment. My thesis looked at the propagation of a single antennae, which could later be extended to multiple antennas. And then unmanned aerial systems—two aircraft between aircraft and ground station or vice versa, measuring between your aircraft and ground station, or aircraft to aircraft and modeling that so you could get insight on… OK, what’s the best way you want to put the antennas in the aircraft? How do you want to fly your aircraft? What’s the flight path you want? Maybe you’re picking up information from a ground sensor. How do you want to fly around this ground sensor to get the maximum bandwidth or data throughput? If you’re flying multiple vehicles at one time and say they’re trying to share the spectrum, how should you space those vehicles out? It’s cheaper than actually performing the flight test. So that way, it’s giving us cost savings and the insight it provides, you just can’t attain that with the flight test. The algorithms that I wrote and the documentation that I’ve come up with is going to be used in the unmanned aerial systems track for their communications lab. My code provides ability to be modified so that you can track phase shifts in order to use it for radio direction finding, and that’s one of the things that they’re looking for in the small unmanned aerial.