Abstract
Containing a wildfire requires an efficient response and persistent monitoring. A crucial aspect is the ability to search for the boundaries of the wildfire by exploring a wide area. However, even as wildfires are increasing today, the number of available monitoring systems that can provide support is decreasing, creating an operational gap and slow response in such urgent situations. The objective of this work is to estimate a propagating boundary and create an autonomous system that works in real time. It proposes a coordination strategy with a new methodology for estimating the periphery of a propagating phenomenon using limited observations. The complete system design, tested on the high-fidelity simulation, demonstrates that steering the vehicles toward the highest perpendicular uncertainty generates the effective predictions. The results indicate that the new coordination scheme has a large beneficial impact on uncertainty suppression. This study thus suggests that an efficient solution for suppressing uncertainty in monitoring a wildfire is to use a fleet of low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles that can be deployed quickly. Further research is needed on other deployment schemes that work in different natural disaster case studies.
Highlights
In any region undergoing some form of environmental distress, it is very important to detect changes occurring on the ground
This paper demonstrates that if the guidance system accounts for realtime events and is able to adjust the flight formation to incorporate changes, the trajectories are more effective than traditional methods
The environment conditions are being simulated based on a model of a propagated wildfire with a random and bounded spread rate (3 ± 0.1 [m/sec])
Summary
In any region undergoing some form of environmental distress, it is very important to detect changes occurring on the ground. Having a system that follows the event helps rescue human lives, monitor the incident, and allow the human responders to take better actions (as well as deploy assets in an optimal manner to mitigate the incident). It is of great importance to monitor and respond to natural phenomena (e.g., fires) and national security disasters (e.g., emitting source). For many experimental and operational applications, UAVs can enable or enhance the efforts available to researchers or operational teams. In some scenarios, operating in the environment requires special skills or training that operational teams do not have; here an autonomous system can enable access that was previously difficult to obtain. The availability of UAVs as a fast deployable resource allows teams to explore many new kinds of scenarios such as wildfire. The flexibility of the system design further allows for quick changes, reducing the project workload
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