This paper investigates the control of a massive population of UAVs such as drones. The straightforward method of control of UAVs by considering the interactions among them to make a flock requires a huge inter-UAV communication which is impossible to implement in real-time applications. One method of control is to apply the mean field game (MFG) framework which substantially reduces communications among the UAVs. However, to realize this framework, powerful processors are required to obtain the control laws at different UAVs. This requirement limits the usage of the MFG framework for real-time applications such as massive UAV control. Thus, a function approximator based on neural networks (NN) is utilized to approximate the solutions of Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov (FPK) equations. Nevertheless, using an approximate solution can violate the conditions for convergence of the MFG framework. Therefore, the federated learning (FL) approach which can share the model parameters of NNs at drones, is proposed with NN based MFG to satisfy the required conditions. The stability analysis of the NN based MFG approach is presented and the performance of the proposed FL-MFG is elaborated by the simulations.

This paper investigates the autonomous control of massive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for mission-critical applications (e.g., dispatching many UAVs from a source to a destination for firefighting). Achieving their fast travel and low motion energy without inter-UAV collision under wind perturbation is a daunting control task, which incurs huge communication energy for exchanging UAV states in real time. We tackle this problem by exploiting a mean-field game (MFG) theoretic control method that requires the UAV state exchanges only once at the initial source. Afterwards, each UAV can control its acceleration by locally solving two partial differential equations (PDEs), known as the Hamilton-Jacobi- Bellman (HJB) and Fokker-Planck-Kolmogorov (FPK) equations. This approach, however, brings about huge computation energy for solving the PDEs, particularly under multi-dimensional UAV states. We address this issue by utilizing a machine learning (ML) method where two separate ML models approximate the solutions of the HJB and FPK equations. These ML models are trained and exploited using an online gradient descent method with low computational complexity. Numerical evaluations validate that the proposed ML aided MFG theoretic algorithm, referred to as \emph{MFG learning control}, is effective in collision avoidance with low communication energy and acceptable computation energy.

The issue considered in the current study is the problem of adaptive distributed estimation based on diffusion strategy which can exploit sparsity in improving estimation error and reducing communications. It has been shown that distributed estimation leads to a good performance in terms of the error value, convergence rate, and robustness against node and link failures in wireless sensor networks. However, the main focus of many works in the field of distributed estimation research is on convergence speed and estimation error, neglecting the fact that communications among the nodes require a lot of transmissions. In this work, the focus is on a solution based on sparse diffusion least mean squares (LMS) algorithm, and a new version of sparse diffusion LMS algorithm is proposed which takes both communications and error cost into account. Also, the computation complexity and communication cost for every node of the network, as well as performance analysis of the proposed strategy, is provided. The performance of the proposed method in comparison with the existing methods is illustrated by means of simulations in terms of computational and communicational cost, and flexibility to signal changes.