Energy-Aware Integrated Communication and Control for AAV Swarm Formation With Communication Reliability Guarantees

The formation management of autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) swarms requires reliable control and communication mechanisms for effective operation. Existing approaches primarily focus on formation control with communication considerations, often overlooking energy constraints and communication reliability challenges critical in real-world deployments. This letter proposes an energy-aware integrated communication and control (EA-ICAC) framework that jointly optimizes formation control, communication resource allocation, and energy consumption while providing reliability guarantees. We formulate this as a constrained optimization problem and develop a twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3-DDPG) algorithm that incorporates both energy models and communication reliability metrics. Our approach introduces an adaptive power allocation scheme that dynamically adjusts transmission power based on communication requirements and remaining energy. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method reduces energy consumption by up to 27% while maintaining formation control accuracy and achieving 99.8% communication reliability, even in challenging wireless environments with moderate to high interference.