Enhancing UAV Trajectory and Communications Through Vision-Inertial Tracking

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient and reliable communication system for non-terrestrial networks deployed in dynamic GPS-denied wireless environments, enabled by a Vision--Inertial Tracking-Assisted UAV Communication (VIT-UAVCom) system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to exploit onboard UAV cameras and IMU sensors for UAV-assisted communications. We consider a complete VIT-UAVCom system that incorporates the key design parameters while explicitly accounting for system noise and residual tracking inaccuracies. Building on this framework, we formulate an optimization problem for jointly designing the UAV trajectory and communication performance to improve propulsion energy efficiency, reduce outage probability, and enhance physical-layer security. We then develop a dedicated solution framework to efficiently compute near-optimal trajectory and communication control actions in dynamic scenarios. Furthermore, to enable real-time implementation, we propose and evaluate three optimizers, namely linear search (LS), binary search (BS), and genetic search. Our numerical results demonstrate that our proposed VIT-UAVCom framework significantly outperforms the K-means benchmark in terms of energy consumption while maintaining robust secrecy performance and reliable user coverage. Specifically, our proposed framework improves the energy efficiency by 144% compared to the benchmark. Interestingly, our results also show that, compared with the LS, the BS reduces the computational time by approximately 50%.