Uav flight path and attitude optimized to hide signals during communication
Exploiting UAV Attitude for Covert Communications: Dynamics-Consistent Trajectory-Attitude Co-Design
Information Theory
Summary
Transmitting secret messages from drones is tricky because how the drone moves affects where its antenna points and how well the message is sent. The authors studied how to plan a drone’s flight and body orientation together so the antenna aims better while keeping messages hidden from eavesdroppers. They made a math model that includes the drone’s movements, antenna direction, and limits like turning speed. Their method finds the best flight patterns that balance sending data well and staying unnoticed. They also made their approach work even when the drone’s controls aren’t perfect, making it practical for real drones.
What this means in practice
- •For drone communication engineers: Design flight paths and antenna orientations to improve secret message delivery by drones while avoiding detection from adversaries.
- •For wireless security teams: Enhance secure data transmission strategies for unmanned systems by jointly optimizing flight dynamics and radio channels under real-world constraints.
Authors
Jinpeng Xu, Lin Zhou, Xin Xie, Mengyuan Zhang, Jingjing Wang
Abstract
Existing trajectory designs for covert communications with uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) typically rely on point-mass kinematics, which overlook the inherent coupling between flight maneuvers and antenna orientation. Motivated by recent studies linking UAV acceleration to attitude, we investigate dynamics-consistent trajectory and attitude co-design for rotary-wing UAV covert communications. We consider a UAV equipped with a directional antenna transmitting confidential information to a legitimate ground receiver in the presence of a warden. The acceleration-induced reduced attitude of the UAV is explicitly modeled together with its impact on the attitude-dependent directional channel gain. To ensure covertness, we derive a per-slot constraint based on the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence at the warden. We then formulate a joint trajectory and attitude optimization problem to maximize the average achievable covert rate subject to covertness, motion, thrust-magnitude, attitude-smoothness, and acceleration-domain safety constraints induced by roll and pitch limits. The resulting problem is non-convex because the channel gains depend jointly on position, acceleration, and attitude. To solve it, we develop a minorization--maximization (MM)-based algorithm that constructs a concave lower bound on the transmission rate and a convex upper bound on the covert constraint at each iteration. We further extend the framework to imperfect attitude control and develop a robust design against attitude tracking errors caused by actuator limitations, sensor noise, and control delays. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamics-consistent design and highlight the benefit of jointly optimizing UAV trajectory and attitude for covert communications.