Integrated Control, Communication, and Computing for Mission-Critical Embedded Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are extensively investigated for military applications due to their exceptional agility and capability to conduct deep incursions into hostile territories. However, numerous military UAVs are vulnerable to global positioning system (GPS) spoofing attacks, which deliberately generate false GPS signals to deceive UAV navigation systems. To effectively control UAVs in the absence of GPS signals, this paper proposes their location estimate algorithm. Additionally, an aerodynamic analysis of UAVs is conducted to ensure rapid maneuvering capabilities and to prevent collisions. Deploying military UAVs for reconnaissance missions through swarm flight requires not only robust control systems but also a reliable communication framework. Consequently, a hybrid medium access control protocol for military UAVs is introduced. This protocol facilitates uninterrupted communication during swarm flights by dynamically adapting communication methods, specifically carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) and time division multiple access (TDMA), based on the movement states of the military UAVs. Prioritizing communication efficiency alone may neglect the energy efficiency and queue stability of UAVs. To address this, dynamic power control for low-power computing is implemented through Lyapunov optimization, taking into account both energy consumption and queue stability. Integrated control, communication, and computing algorithms must operate robustly in unison to enable UAVs to execute stable reconnaissance missions. Thus, in this paper, the embedded UAVs are designed to incorporate these crucial components and their performance is evaluated across these three aspects.