Solving Source Location Problems with Particle Swarm Optimizer and Height Information

Recently, there has been great interest in utilizing robot swarm to solve source location problems. A particle swarm optimizer (PSO) is among the most popular method. To our best knowledge, almost all work in this field focuses on a 2-D search space while ignoring height information. This work proposes a 3-D source location model where the sensing range of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) gradually increases with its flying height, but its obtained signal strength gradually weakens. It can avoid meaningless wandering of UAV s in no-signal areas. Experimental results show that the effective use of height information can significantly improve the search efficiency.