Formation Control for CRLB-Optimal Cooperative Sensing in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Cooperative sensing with uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a key enabler for low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs), where sensing accuracy critically depends on the spatial configuration of the UAV formation. In this paper, we study formation design and control for Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB)-optimal cooperative target sensing. We first establish a sensing performance model based on range measurements and derive the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of the target location. By adopting the A-optimality criterion, we analytically characterize the formation geometry that minimizes the CRLB of the estimation error. The optimal formation is shown to exhibit isotropic Fisher information in the horizontal plane, leading to a regular polygon geometry with an elevation angle determined by the tradeoff between path loss and geometric diversity. Building on this result, we further develop a distributed formation control strategy that steers UAVs from arbitrary initial deployments toward the sensing-optimal configuration while maintaining formation motion and obstacle avoidance. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms benchmark formations in terms of CRLB and achieves reliable convergence under practical constraints.

Advancing the Control of Low-Altitude Wireless Networks: Architecture, Design Principles, and Future Directions

This article introduces a control-oriented low-altitude wireless network (LAWN) that integrates near-ground communications and remote estimation of the internal system state. This integration supports reliable networked control in dynamic aerial-ground environments. First, we introduce the network's modular architecture and key performance metrics. Then, we discuss core design trade-offs across the control, communication, and estimation layers. A case study illustrates closed-loop coordination under wireless constraints. Finally, we outline future directions for scalable, resilient LAWN deployments in real-time and resource-constrained scenarios.

Predictive Control over LAWN: Joint Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation

Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs) have been envisioned as flexible and transformative platforms for enabling delay-sensitive control applications in Internet of Things (IoT) systems. In this work, we investigate the real-time wireless control over a LAWN system, where an aerial drone is employed to serve multiple mobile automated guided vehicles (AGVs) via finite blocklength (FBL) transmission. Toward this end, we adopt the model predictive control (MPC) to ensure accurate trajectory tracking, while we analyze the communication reliability using the outage probability. Subsequently, we formulate an optimization problem to jointly determine control policy, transmit power allocation, and drone trajectory by accounting for the maximum travel distance and control input constraints. To address the resultant non-convex optimization problem, we first derive the closed-form expression of the outage probability under FBL transmission. Based on this, we reformulate the original problem as a quadratic programming (QP) problem, followed by developing an alternating optimization (AO) framework. Specifically, we employ the projected gradient descent (PGD) method and the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique to achieve computationally efficient sub-optimal solutions. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm. Extensive simulations and AirSim-based experiments are conducted to validate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to the baseline schemes in terms of control performance.

Co-Design of Sensing, Communications, and Control for Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

The rapid advancement of Internet of Things (IoT) services and the evolution toward the sixth generation (6G) have positioned unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as critical enablers of low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs). This work investigates the co-design of integrated sensing, communication, and control ($\mathbf{SC^{2}}$) for multi-UAV cooperative systems with finite blocklength (FBL) transmission. In particular, the UAVs continuously monitor the state of the field robots and transmit their observations to the robot controller to ensure stable control while cooperating to localize an unknown sensing target (ST). To this end, a weighted optimization problem is first formulated by jointly considering the control and localization performance in terms of the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) cost and the determinant of the Fisher information matrix (FIM), respectively. The resultant problem, optimizing resource allocations, the UAVs' deployment positions, and multi-user scheduling, is non-convex. To circumvent this challenge, we first derive a closed-form expression of the LQR cost with respect to other variables. Subsequently, the non-convex optimization problem is decomposed into a series of sub-problems by leveraging the alternating optimization (AO) approach, in which the difference of convex functions (DC) programming and projected gradient descent (PGD) method are employed to obtain an efficient near-optimal solution. Furthermore, the convergence and computational complexity of the proposed algorithm are thoroughly analyzed. Extensive simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared to the benchmark schemes and reveal the trade-off between control and sensing performance.