Real-time On-board Path Planning for UAS-based Wildfire Monitoring

The use of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in wildfire monitoring is increasing significantly due to its benefits in terms of flexibility, lower cost, and safety. To effectively monitor and collect data about a wildfire, UAS path planning is essential. Many of the applications adopt a centralized approach that uses a computer on the ground to provide path planning information for individual UASs. The applicability and robustness of such centralized approaches are limited due to the challenging wildfire environments. In addition, very few of the existing applications focus on the most actively spreading region of the fire which needs special monitoring attention. In this paper, we present an on-board path planning algorithm for UAS-based wildfire monitoring. The proposed algorithm uses real-time data collected by the UAS to direct the UAS to monitor the wildfire with special attention to the most active regions of the fire. Simulation results have been presented to show the effectiveness of the algorithm in different simulated wildfire scenarios.