Integrated Communication and Control for Formation Management of UAV Swarms

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm has been considered as a promising paradigm for conducting complex tasks in remote or hostile environments. In this paper, the integrated communication and control (ICAC) assisted formation management of UAV swarms is studied, where a head UAV is responsible for generating and transmitting wireless signals for controlling the flight states of the following UAVs remotely. The control performance, i.e., the control MSE, of the ICAC system is analysed theoretically. Then, the optimal resource allocation of sub-carriers and the control data rate is obtained by minimizing the fair control MSE among following UAVs. Simulation results evaluate the performance of the ICAC assisted UAV swarm system, which demonstrate that the control MSE is convex respect to the control data rate.