Line based Geometrical Path Planning Algorithm for Extinguishing Forest Fires

Abstract

In this work a mathematical approach based path planning of actor which uses equation of a straight line passing through two points is proposed to extinguish forest fires. Forest domain is considered as a square area and is tessellated into n x n cells (small squares) of desired size. The Actor which performs actions similar to the actions performed by a robot is assumed to be available at one cell which is considered as one point and the cell in which fire occurs is considered as the second point. The equation of straight line is found out using these two points. Then using the straight line equation the sequence of intermediate cells between the cell where the Actor is available and the cell where the fire is occurred is computed and stored in memory. Then a check is made for presence of obstacle in the intermediate cells. If there are obstacles present then a cell without obstacle and also nearer to obstacle cell is found out and replaced in the memory. Integrity check is performed to make sure that successive points are incremental points. i.e. whether the next point can be reached in one move. Then the sequence of points stored in the memory is used by the Actor to move to the cell where fire is occurred and after reaching that cell the actor will start to extinguish fire. Computer simulation results shows that the algorithm works well in all aspects for environment with and without obstacles and it computes the path for the actor to extinguish Forest fire without collision with obstacles. General Terms Forest fires, Path Planning, Straight Line Equation passing through two points.