Evolved antenna

Evolved antennas are antennas designed fully or substantially by an automatic design procedure mimicking Darwinian evolution. The first evolved antenna designs appeared in the mid-1990s from the work of Michielssen, Altshuler, Linden, Haupt, and Rahmat-Samii. Most practitioners use the genetic algorithms technique or some variant thereof to evolve antenna designs.

An example of an evolved antenna is an X-band antenna evolved for a 2006 NASA mission called [http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/st5/ Space Technology 5 (ST5)] . The mission consists of three satellites that will take measurements in Earth's magnetosphere. Each satellite has two communication antennas to talk to ground stations. The antenna has an unusual structure and was evolved to meet a challenging set of mission requirements, notably the combination of wide beamwidth for a circularly polarized wave and wide impedance bandwidth. For comparison, a traditional approach to meet the mission requirements might involve a helical antenna design, or specifically, a quadrifilar helix. The ST5 mission successfully launched on March 22, 2006, and so this evolved antenna represents the world's first artificially-evolved object to fly in space.

References

* [http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/research/antenna.htm Automated Antenna Design] at NASA Ames Research Center
* [http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/projects/esg/publications/lohn_papers/gptp2004.pdf A paper] given by Lohn, Hornby, and Linden at the [http://cscs.umich.edu/old/calendar/conferences/gptp2004/ Genetic Programming Theory Practice 2004 Workshop] .