UAV-USV Collaborative Sensing System Based on Integrated Sensing and Communication

To leverage the complementary advantages of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) in coupled air-sea environments, we propose a cooperative sensing framework based on integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). The framework optimizes the UAV’s hover points, beamforming, and UAV & USV trajectories together to reduce overall system energy consumption. First of all, the hover point selection is formulated as a trade-off between the number of hover points and sensing distances. At each hover point, the UAV transmits ISAC signals for target sensing and maintains a communication link with the USV. Secondly, the system operates in two modes:flight modeandhover mode. In flight mode, the UAV and USV maintain stable communication while navigating safely to the hover points. In hover mode, the UAV remains stationary to perform S&C tasks, ensuring that each target meets the required cumulative sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and that the communication rate with the USV is maintained. To solve the trajectory and beamforming optimization problem, we combine techniques such as Semidefinite Relaxation (SDR) and Successive Convex Approximation (SCA). Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves notably lower energy consumption than the baseline scheme. They also reveal that the design of hover points achieves a balance between system energy consumption and the upper bound of sensing performance.