Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Over-The-Air Control of UAV Swarm Dynamics

Coordinated controlling a large UAV swarm requires significant spectrum resources due to the need for bandwidth allocation per UAV, posing a challenge in resource-limited environments. Over-the-air (OTA) control has emerged as a spectrum-efficient approach, leveraging electromagnetic superposition to form control signals at a base station (BS). However, existing OTA controllers lack sufficient optimization variables to meet UAV swarm control objectives and fail to integrate control with other BS functions like sensing. This work proposes an integrated sensing and OTA control framework (ISAC-OTA) for UAV swarm. The BS performs OTA signal construction (uplink) and dispatch (downlink) while simultaneously sensing objects. Two uplink post-processing methods are developed: a control-centric approach generating closed-form control signals via a feedback-looped OTA control problem, and a sensing-centric method mitigating transmission-induced interference for accurate object sensing. For the downlink, a non-convex problem is formulated and solved to minimize control signal dispatch (transmission) error while maintaining a minimum sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Simulation results show that the proposed ISAC-OTA controller achieves control performance comparable to the benchmark optimal control algorithm while maintaining high sensing accuracy, despite OTA transmission interference. Moreover, it eliminates the need for per-UAV bandwidth allocation, showcasing a spectrum-efficient method for cooperative control in future wireless systems.