Enhanced bandwidth of a microstrip antenna using a parasitic mushroom-like metamaterial structure for multi-robot cooperative navigation

The broadband design of a microstrip patch antenna is presented and experimentally studied for multi-robot cooperation. A parasitic mushroom-like metamaterial (MTM) patch close to a microstrip top patch is excited through gap-coupling, thereby producing a resonance frequency. Because of the design, the resonance frequency of the parasitic MTM patch is adjacent to that of the main patch, and the presented antenna can achieve an enhanced bandwidth of 450 MHz, which is about two times the bandwidth of a conventional patch antenna without the MTM parasitic patch. The error rate of packet transmissions for measuring the distance between a leader robot and a follower robot was also improved by almost two-fold.