  The smart morphing wing aircraft (SMWA) is a highly adaptable platform that
can be widely used for intelligent warfare due to its real-time variable
structure. The flexible conformal array (FCA) is a vital detection component of
SMWA, when the deformation parameters of FCA are mismatched or array elements
are mutually coupled, detection performance will be degraded. To overcome this
problem and ensure robust beamforming for FCA, deviations in array control
parameters (ACPs) and array perturbations, the effect of mutual coupling in
addition to looking-direction errors should be considered. In this paper, we
propose a robust adaptive beamforming (RAB) algorithm by reconstructing a
multi-domain interference plus noise covariance matrix (INCM) and estimating
steering vector (SV) for FCA. We first reconstruct the INCM using multi-domain
processing, including ACP and angular domains. Then, SV estimation is executed
through an optimization procedure. Experimental results have shown that the
proposed beamformer outperforms existing beamformers in various mismatch
conditions and harsh environments, such as high interference-to-noise ratios,
and mutual coupling of antennas.
