Semantic-Aware UAV Command and Control for Efficient IoT Data Collection

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a key enabler technology for data collection from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, effective data collection is challenged by resource constraints and the need for real-time decision-making. In this work, we propose a novel framework that integrates semantic communication with UAV command-and-control (C&C) to enable efficient image data collection from IoT devices. Each device uses Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding (DeepJSCC) to generate a compact semantic latent representation of its image to enable image reconstruction even under partial transmission. A base station (BS) controls the UAV's trajectory by transmitting acceleration commands. The objective is to maximize the average quality of reconstructed images by maintaining proximity to each device for a sufficient duration within a fixed time horizon. To address the challenging trade-off and account for delayed C&C signals, we model the problem as a Markov Decision Process and propose a Double Deep Q-Learning (DDQN)-based adaptive flight policy. Simulation results show that our approach outperforms baseline methods such as greedy and traveling salesman algorithms, in both device coverage and semantic reconstruction quality.