Exploiting UAV Attitude for Covert Communications: Dynamics-Consistent Trajectory-Attitude Co-Design

Abstract

Existing trajectory designs for covert communications with uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) typically rely on point-mass kinematics, which overlook the inherent coupling between flight maneuvers and antenna orientation. Motivated by recent studies linking UAV acceleration to attitude, we investigate dynamics-consistent trajectory and attitude co-design for rotary-wing UAV covert communications. We consider a UAV equipped with a directional antenna transmitting confidential information to a legitimate ground receiver in the presence of a warden. The acceleration-induced reduced attitude of the UAV is explicitly modeled together with its impact on the attitude-dependent directional channel gain. To ensure covertness, we derive a per-slot constraint based on the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence at the warden. We then formulate a joint trajectory and attitude optimization problem to maximize the average achievable covert rate subject to covertness, motion, thrust-magnitude, attitude-smoothness, and acceleration-domain safety constraints induced by roll and pitch limits. The resulting problem is non-convex because the channel gains depend jointly on position, acceleration, and attitude. To solve it, we develop a minorization--maximization (MM)-based algorithm that constructs a concave lower bound on the transmission rate and a convex upper bound on the covert constraint at each iteration. We further extend the framework to imperfect attitude control and develop a robust design against attitude tracking errors caused by actuator limitations, sensor noise, and control delays. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamics-consistent design and highlight the benefit of jointly optimizing UAV trajectory and attitude for covert communications.