Unveiling Pollution Peaks: Comparing Swarm Intelligence with Drone Hill Climber

Climate Change has become an accelerating problem in recent years due to pollutants like greenhouse gases, with carbon dioxide being the most prominent. Similarly in time, works on the application and development of swarm intelligence using drones, along with the use of drones to monitor air pollution/ source discovery, have been carried out in isolation to date. This paper presents an investigation to discover multiple pollution sources using a variety of existing swarm intelligence algorithms, through simulated drones. This paper also presents a bespoke Drone Hill Climber (DHC) algorithm that introduces the novel of multiple drones each flying on their own set paths, with the aim of finding multiple pollution peaks at efficient speeds.