Curriculum-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Energy-Efficient UAV-ISAC in Post-Disaster Search-and-Rescue Operations

📅 2026-09-01
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF
🤖 AI Summary
本文针对无人机在灾后搜索救援中的能效问题,提出了一种课程引导的软演员-评论家框架,优化了三维轨迹、通信-感知功率分配及用户功率分配,显著提高了能效。
📝 Abstract
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are promising platforms for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), but their limited onboard energy creates a strong coupling among sensing accuracy, communication quality, and propulsion cost. This paper proposes a curriculum-guided soft actor-critic (CG-SAC) framework with propulsion-aware reward shaping for energy-efficient UAV-ISAC, jointly optimizing the 3D trajectory, communication-sensing power split, and per-user power allocation. A rotary-wing propulsion model is incorporated to derive a closed-form propulsion-economic cruising speed, which is used to construct a propulsion-aware speed-shaping term within a normalized composite reward together with navigation, node-visiting, energy-efficiency, and constraint-penalty terms. A log-linear curriculum progressively tightens the communication, sensing, and proximity requirements during training. Across 2000 randomized scenarios, CG-SAC achieves an average energy efficiency of 0.72 Mbits/J, substantially outperforming the evaluated DRL baselines. Among successfully completed missions, it requires 107.6 steps on average, corresponding to a 66%--82% reduction in flight steps relative to the baselines. Crucially, the learned policy exhibits mission-aware speed adaptation by decelerating near service points and accelerating during transit, while achieving a 99.6% communication-rate satisfaction ratio at service instants. Ablation results further demonstrate the complementary roles of the reward components in balancing mission feasibility and energy efficiency.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

UAV-ISAC
Energy Efficiency
Post-Disaster Search-and-Rescue
Integrated Sensing and Communication
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

curriculum-guided
soft actor-critic
energy-efficient UAV-ISAC
propulsion-aware reward shaping
log-linear curriculum
T
Tai-You Guo
Department of Communications Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Minxiong Township, Chiayi County 621301, Taiwan
C
Chuan-Chi Lai
Department of Communications Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Minxiong Township, Chiayi County 621301, Taiwan, and also with the Advanced Institute of Manufacturing with High-tech Innovations (AIM-HI), National Chung Cheng University, Minxiong Township, Chiayi County 621301, Taiwan