A cooperative UAV/UGV platform for wildfire detection and fighting

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have received much attention in the research and development community due to their strong potential in certain high-risk missions. In applications that involve multiple vehicles, the inter-vehicle communication and cooperation becomes a critical challenge to a successful mission. An effective co-operative control framework is required to co-ordinate the system-level decision making process and information flow among the multiple agents such that the collective mission is optimally achieved. In this paper, a cooperative control framework for a hierarchical UAV/UGV platform is proposed. A top-level mobile mission controller provides effective mission planning and system-level decision making such that mission completion time and resource expenditure are optimized. The mobile mission controller can monitor the dynamic environment with its own sensing capabilities and coordinate UAVs/UGVs in their actions. This paper discusses the potential application of the proposed hierarchical vehicle platform to high-risk missions, specifically in the context of wildfire fighting. The task generation and allocation problems and proposed approaches are presented under the given control framework.