Tools for Automated Antenna Design and Optimization

Current methods of designing and optimizing antennas by hand are time and labor intensive, limit complexity, and require significant expertise and experience. Evolutionary design techniques can overcome these limitations by searching the design space and automatically finding effective solutions that would ordinarily not be found. In recent years, evolutionary algorithms have shown great promise in finding practical solutions in large, complex design spaces. We present automated antenna design and optimization methods based on evolutionary algorithms. We have evolved efficient antennas for a variety of aerospace applications, and here we describe one proof-of-concept study and one project that produced flight antennas that flew on NASA’s Space Technology 5 (ST5) mission. We discuss the software tools we developed to automate the design of these evolved antennas which are the first ever artificially-evolved objects to fly in space. ∗Research Associate, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269-1, Mountain View, CA 94035, USA †Research Scientist, UC Santa Cruz, NASA Ames Research Center, MS 269-3, Mountain View, CA 94035, USA ‡Chief Scientist, JEM Engineering, 8683 Cherry Lane, Laurel, MD 20707, USA