Evaluation of Planar Inkjet-Printed Antennas on a Low-Cost Origami Flapping Robot

An investigation on antenna solutions for expendable origami paper flapping robots is presented. An origami flapping robotic bird that can be produced using standard A4 paper is employed. Antennas resonating at the two commonly used frequency bands, 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz, are designed for the limited space available on the folded origami structure. Two developments of the same dual-band monopole antenna are discussed. The first antenna is located on the robot’s spine and the second on its tail. A space diversity configuration is also studied. The antennas are printed directly onto a photo paper substrate and then folded into an origami robotic crane’s body structure. An ordinary desktop inkjet printer fitted with silver nanoparticle conductive ink cartridges has been employed. CST Microwave Studio™ has been used to design the antennas. A good agreement between the measured and simulated $S_{11}$ results is achieved with a reasonable −10dB impedance bandwidth realized in the three cases studied. The radiation patterns are omnidirectional in the XZ plane which is desirable for the specific application. The diversity configuration has a mutual coupling of <−23dB and a gain of 1.4 dB and 2.8 dB at 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz respectively. The aim is to provide a new vision for antennas embedded into expandable flying robots based on traditional origami structures.

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