Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), also called drones, are used for Search And Rescue (SAR) missions, mainly in the form of a pilot manoeuvring a single drone. However, the increase in labour to cover larger areas quickly would result in a very high cost and time spent per rescue operation. Therefore, there is a need for an easy to use, low-cost, and highly autonomous swarm of drones for SAR missions where the detection and rescue times are kept to a minimum. In this thesis, a Subsumption-based architecture is proposed, which combines multiple behaviours to create more complex behaviours. An investigation of (1) what are the critical aspects of controlling a swarm of drones, (2) how can a combination of different behavioural algorithms increase the performance of a swarm of drones, and (3) what benchmarks are necessary when evaluating the fitness of the behavioural algorithms. The proposed architecture was simulated in AirSim using the SimpleFlight flight controller through experiments that evaluated the individual layers and missions that simulated real-life scenarios. The results validate the modularity and reliability of the architecture, where the architecture has the potential for improvements in future iterations. For the search area of 400×400meters, the swarm consistently produced an average area coverage of at least 99.917% and found all the missing people in all missions, with the slowest average being 563 seconds. Compared to related work, the result produced similar or better times when scaled to the same proportions and higher area coverage. As comparisons of results in SAR missions can be difficult, the introduction of Active time can serve as a benchmark for others in future swarm performance measurements.

La collecte participative des données mobiles est un nouveau paradigme dédié aux applications de détection urbaines utilisant une foule de participants munis de téléphones intelligents. Pour mener à bien les tâches de collecte participative des données mobiles, diverses préoccupations relatives aux participants et aux organisateurs doivent être soigneusement prises en considération. Pour les participants, la principale préoccupation porte sur la consommation d'énergie, le coût des données mobiles, etc. Pour les organisateurs, la qualité des données et le budget sont les deux préoccupations essentielles. Dans cette thèse, deux mécanismes de collecte participative des données mobiles sont proposés : le téléchargement montant collaboratif des données et la collecte clairsemée des données mobiles. Pour le téléchargement montant collaboratif des données, deux procédés sont proposés 1) « effSense », qui fournit la meilleure solution permettant d’économiser la consommation d'énergie aux participants ayant un débit suffisant, et de réduire le coût des communications mobiles aux participants ayant un débit limité; 2) « ecoSense », qui permet de réduire le remboursement incitatif par les organisateurs des frais associés au coût des données mobiles des participants. Dans la collecte clairsemée des données mobiles, les corrélations spatiales et temporelles entre les données détectées sont exploitées pour réduire de manière significative le nombre de tâches allouées et, par conséquent, le budget associé aux organisateurs, tout en assurant la qualité des données. De plus, l’intimité différentielle est afin de répondre au besoin de préservation de la localisation des participants / Mobile crowdsensing is a novel paradigm for urban sensing applications using a crowd of participants' sensor-equipped smartphones. To successfully complete mobile crowdsensing tasks, various concerns of participants and organizers need to be carefully considered. For participants, primary concerns include energy consumption, mobile data cost, privacy, etc. For organizers, data quality and budget are two critical concerns. In this dissertation, to address both participants' and organizers' concerns, two mobile crowdsensing mechanisms are proposed - collaborative data uploading and sparse mobile crowdsensing. In collaborative data uploading, participants help each other through opportunistic encounters and data relays in the data uploading process of crowdsensing, in order to save energy consumption, mobile data cost, etc. Specifically, two collaborative data uploading procedures are proposed (1) effSense, which helps participants with enough data plan to save energy consumption, and participants with little data plan to save mobile data cost; (2) ecoSense, which reduces organizers' incentive refund that is paid for covering participants' mobile data cost. In sparse mobile crowdsensing, spatial and temporal correlations among sensed data are leveraged to significantly reduce the number of allocated tasks thus organizers' budget, still ensuring data quality. Specifically, a sparse crowdsensing task allocation framework, CCS-TA, is implemented with compressive sensing, active learning, and Bayesian inference techniques. Furthermore, differential privacy is introduced into sparse mobile crowdsensing to address participants' location privacy concerns