Machine Learning-Aided Design of Dielectric-Filled Slotted Waveguide Antennas With Specified Sidelobe Levels

This paper presents the use of machine learning (ML) to facilitate the design of dielectric-filled Slotted Waveguide Antennas (SWAs) with specified sidelobe level ratios (SLR). Conventional design methods for air-filled SWAs require the simultaneous solving of complex equations to deduce the antenna's design parameters, which typically requires further manual simulation-based optimization to reach the desired resonance frequency and SLR. The few works that investigated the design of filled SWAs, did not optimize the design for a specified SLR. For an accelerated design process in the case of specified SLRs, we formulate the design of dielectric-filled SWAs as a regression problem where based on input specifications of the antenna's SLR, reflection coefficient, frequency of operation, and relative permittivity of the dielectric material, the developed ML model predicts the filled SWA's design parameters with very low error. These parameters include the unified slots length and the non-uniform slot displacements required to achieve the desired performance. We experiment with several regressive ML algorithms and provide a comparative study of their results. Our numerical evaluations and validation experiments with the best performing ML models demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed ML approach in estimating the dielectric-filled SWA's design parameters in only a few milliseconds. A comparison to the design obtained through conventional optimization using the Genetic Algorithm also indicates superiority of the ML models in computation time and resulting antenna performance.