A Solution for Searching and Monitoring Forest Fires Based on Multiple UAVs

Forest fires usually appear in complicated terrain, as a result, ground vehicles are obviously inaccessible to these fire areas. In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been paid increasing attention and become a very promising solution to forest fires searching and monitoring. This paper explores the application of UAVs in the wild forest fires searching and fire frontier monitoring mission. First, the FARSITE fire model is used to simulate the realistic wild fire behavior. After that, the fire search problem is solved with Genetic Algorithm (GA). Then, a cooperative fire monitoring algorithm is investigated. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed searching and monitoring methods.