A Distributed Control Framework for a Team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Dynamic Wildfire Tracking

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed control framework enabling a team of UAVs to safely and effectively monitor and track the development of wildfires in open spaces, enhancing safety and operational efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control framework for UAV teams that ensures collision avoidance and cooperative wildfire tracking, demonstrated through experimental validation.

Findings

UAV team effectively covers spreading wildfires

Framework ensures collision-free operation

Experimental results validate real-world applicability

Abstract

Wildland fire fighting is a very dangerous job, and the lack of information of the fire front is one of main reasons that causes many accidents. Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace human in hazardous fire tracking and save operation costs significantly. In this paper we propose a distributed control framework designed for a team of UAVs that can closely monitor a wildfire in open space, and precisely track its development. The UAV team, designed for flexible deployment, can effectively avoid in-flight collision as well as cooperate well with other neighbors. Experimental results are conducted to demonstrate the capabilites of the UAV team in covering a spreading wildfire.