At the Intersection of Art and Physics
Satellite Antennas
Inspired by Origami
AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY, STUDENTS HELP INVENT
A NEW KIND OF COMMUNICATIONS DEVICEable configurations. She starts with a
population of hundreds or thousands
of possible options for a new origami
antenna, then enlists a code to perform
the inexorable Darwinian process.
“Since we have a lot of [solutions], an
algorithm will have the population go
through a series of natural selection, kill
off certain answers, pick parents, and
then produce offspring,” she says. “This
is going to happen over and over and
over until we have a set of solutions or
a population that we’re happy with. I’m
not really dealing with anything biolog-
ical—I’m just mimicking the patterns
that we see in nature.”
Gonzalez writes her code in FIU’s
new Transforming Antennas Center
(TAC), founded last year by Stavros
Georgakopoulos, a professor in FIU’s
Department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering. The center is funded
by a $4.8 million grant from the Air
Force Office of Scientific Research.
Georgakopoulos, who joined FIU in
2007, directs seven undergraduate
students, 12 graduate students, and two
post-doctorate researchers developing
origami communication and sensing
antennas. He holds five patents on phys-
ically reconfigurable antennas.
Traditional antennas change their
performance and operating frequen-
cies through electronics. “We want
to combine [electronic means] with
physical reconfiguration, which means
that the actual antennas change their
shape through folding and morphing,”
Georgakopoulos says. Their lightnessA painter and sculptor since she was a child, Florida
International University student Briana Gonzalez brings an
artistic sensibility to her work at a new FIU center to design
“origami” antennas. The lightweight antennas are designed
to fold, like origami, for easy packing, making them useful
for spacecraft and for soldiers who ordinarily lug heavy
communications equipment. Once deployed, using simple
mechanisms, the antennas can continue to change their
profiles and performance. Such designs are more efficient
than rigid antennas, and their unconventional nature—and
aesthetics—appeal to Gonzalez, who is working toward a
degree combining art, electrical engineering, and physics. “I
think that [art] makes me think about problems differently,”
Gonzalez says. “Maybe it makes me approach them from a
different point of view...because I’m constantly activating
my brain in a different way.”
To identify which origami antenna designs hold the most
promise, Gonzalez writes computer code for algorithms that
use a process akin to natural selection to eliminate unwork-
Left to right:
Nicholas Russo,
Constantine
Zekios, Yousuf
Shafi q, and Kun
Bao help operate
FIU’s Antenna
Measurement
System.22 AIR & SPACE airspacemag.com/nextCOURTESY FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY (3)