Joint Design of Communication Sensing and Control With a UAV Platform

In this article, a joint design of communication sensing and control (JDCSC) scheme is developed which focuses on a scenario where a cellular-connected unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) senses a moving target. The goal is to maximize the sensing mutual information via jointly optimizing the transmit power, the trajectory of the UAV and the task completion time, while meeting the onboard energy, the communication service quality, and the UAV flight safety constraints. In particular, UAV dynamics are considered, which are usually ignored in the existing design and inferior communication and sensing quality of service might be resulted. The formulated problem is dynamic optimization problem, which is difficult to be solved. The control parameterization method and exact penalty function scheme are utilized to transform the problem into a static nonlinear program which can be solved by gradient-based methods. The effectiveness of the JDCSC approach is verified by carrying out some numerical examples.