Wild Land Fire Fighting Using Multiple Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles
Manish Kumar, Kelly De Oliveira Cohen · AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Conference · 2009
This paper presents a strategy for cooperative control of a number of Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) engaged in extinguishing a forest fire. In this paper, a relatively simple scenario is which makes the following assumptions: information regarding the location of fire and position of all UAVs is made available to each UAV; and each UAV is equipped with unlimited fire suppressant fluid which extinguishes fire in a circle of specified area directly beneath it. This paper formulates the problem of fire fighting based upon optimization of a utility function, develops a decentralized control method to combat fire using cooperative UAVs, and analyzes the system for its stability and its ability to extinguish fire. The proposed strategy has been verified with the help of extensive simulations. Although the simplifying assumptions have been made, this preliminary study presents a framework for path planning and cooperative control of multiple UAVs engaged in actively controlling forest fire. Future research would involve incorporating a more sophisticated benchmark problem in which the area of interest will include land having different utilities and with several simultaneous fire hot-spots and heterogeneous fire conditions. I.