Wildfire Monitoring in Remote Areas using Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a drone-based wildfire monitoring system for remote and hard-to-reach areas. This system utilizes autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with the main advantage of providing on-demand monitoring service faster than the current approaches of using satellite images, manned aircraft and remotely controlled drones. Furthermore, using autonomous drones facilitates minimizing human intervention in risky wildfire zones. In particular, to develop a fully autonomous system, we propose a distributed leader-follower coalition formation model to cluster a set of drones into multiple coalitions that collectively cover the designated monitoring field. The coalition leader is a drone that employs observer drones potentially with different sensing and imaging capabilities to hover in circular paths and collect imagery information from the impacted areas. The objectives of the proposed system include: i) to cover the entire fire zone with a minimum number of drones, and ii) to minimize the energy consumption and latency of the available drones to fly to the fire zone. Simulation results confirm that the performance of the proposed system-without the need for inter-coalition communications-approaches that of a centrally-optimized system. 1 .

Recent Advancement of Data-Driven Models in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

“…Event-driven model applications are used for emergency and disaster recoverybased applications such as health emergencies, forest fires, earthquakes, monitoring of air quality, animal movement, rain, lava eruption, military applications [96], and volcanic eruption [97][98][99]. The main feature of the event-driven model is that the collection of data is not formed on a continuous, regular basis while an event is occurring.…”

UAV Patrolling for Wildfire Monitoring by a Dynamic Voronoi Tessellation on Satellite Data

“…Several classes of drones have been studied for fire detection and monitoring purposes, such as high altitude/large coverage UAVs [13], quadrotors [14], and fixed wing or stratospheric UAVs for long-term flights [15], with some solutions even envisaging the deployment of fleets of heterogeneous drones [16][17][18] to better exploit their different capabilities. In fact, drone patrolling has always been connected to the problem of formation control, as different drones may be equipped with different sensors or devices to offer specific sensing functionalities.…”

“…In fact, drone patrolling has always been connected to the problem of formation control, as different drones may be equipped with different sensors or devices to offer specific sensing functionalities. In the recent study [18], Afghah et al proposed a framework to monitor wildfires in various environments using a flock composed by different types of drones, and, in order to guarantee the full coverage of the interested area, they developed a decentralized leader-follower structure.…”

UAV-Assisted Communication in Remote Disaster Areas Using Imitation Learning

“…[1], [2]. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks can offer various services during or after disasters such as agile aerial assessment of impacted areas, search and rescue in harsh and hard-to-access regions, delivering emergency supplies, and acting as aerial base stations when the communication infrastructure is damaged [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].…”