Using Swarm Intelligence to Coordinate a Fleet of Drones in a Search and Rescue Mission

This paper presents a modification to the swarm intelligence algorithm to coordinate a fleet of (inexpensive) drones in a search and rescue mission. In this search and rescue scenario, it is common for the target to be moving and therefore renders the original swarm intelligence algorithm, designed for stationary target, to become inapplicable. Thus, the modification of the algorithm to use the triangulation method to approximate the current estimated position of the target as the globally known best solution. This modification allows the target to be moving while the drones, acting as search agents, will converge toward the target without loss of generality. Computer simulations are provided to demonstrate the workability and practicability of the modified swarm intelligence algorithm. Future work is discussed for a scenario where a target (a group of people) is split into multiple targets going in different directions.