A SYNTHESIS METHOD FOR ROBUST FREQUENCY-INVARIANT VERY LARGE BANDWIDTH BEAMFORMING

In this paper a mixed stochastic and analytic method is proposed to synthesize a robust filter-and-sum beamforming system working with an array that is, at the same time, superdirective and undersampled. The method allows to obtain a broadband beam pattern with an optimal trade-off among directivity and frequency-invariance, over a very large bandwidth. The method jointly optimizes the sensors' positions (providing an aperiodic layout) and the coefficients of the filters used to process the signals, deploying a limited number of sensors. The simulation results show the performance and the robustness to array imperfections of the obtained solutions, highlighting the improvement over the literature methods.