Electronic Leashing of an Unmanned Aircraft to a Radio Source

This paper presents a solution to the radio leashing problem in which an autonomous aircraft is electronically tethered to a radio node in order to maintain a communication link between them. The solution presented here solves the leashing problem using only local measurements of the communication link and assumes no knowledge of the radio node location or on the RF propagation environment. In this work, the signal-to-noise ratio for each individual link is the only input into a high-level steering control algorithm.