Cooperative forest monitoring and fire detection using a team of UAVs-UGVs

This paper investigates forest monitoring and fire detection strategies using a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). UAVs have great advantages in forest fire detection and fighting. However they have limited running time and payload capabilities, therefore UGVs are paired with UAVs to avoid their demerits. First, UGVs are used to transport the UAVs to the nearest location to their assigned search area. The UAVs will take-off and start the monitoring and search mission. When one of the UAVs detects the fire, it sends the fire spot coordinates to the leader UGV and ground fire management personnel. Then, the leader UGV that has a powerful computing and image processing capabilities will generate the reference trajectory for UAVs to follow in order to detect and continuously monitor the fire spread. Simulation results are presented in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.