Detecting a Hidden Radio Frequency Transmitter in Noise based on Amplitude using Swarm Intelligence

Abstract

Radio Frequency transmitters are becoming ubiquitous. For instance people oftencarry around a mobile phone containing several such transmitters. Having theability to detect and locate such transmitters in noisy environments can there-fore be very beneficial in search and rescue and disaster management. By usingamplitude measurements, simple hardware can be deployed on small and cheapUnmanned Aerial Vehicles. The use of many cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehi-cles should enable rapid search and more precise geolocation of such transmitters.This thesis explores different search strategies to use on autonomous agentstrying to detect a hidden Radio Frequency transmitter. By testing differentSwarm Intelligence strategies important insight into the search process is gained.The experiments were run on a simulator to enable rapid testing of differentstrategies. In addition to testing baseline algorithms from the literature, a newstrategy is created, the Call-out strategy.The work done, shows that few cooperating searchers should prefer exploita-tion of the transmitted signal over exploration. However, as more agents areemployed this focus is shifted over to exploration. In addition, this work showthat several simple searchers can perform the task with high performance. Thisshows that Swarm Intelligence can be used to direct several cooperative searchersin detecting a hidden Radio Frequency transmitter.