A Distributed Deep Learning Approach for A Team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Wildfire Tracking and Coverage

Recent large wildfires in the United States and the subsequent damage that they have caused have increased the importance of wildfire monitoring and tracking. However, human monitoring on the ground or in the air may be too dangerous and therefore, there need to be alternatives to monitoring wildfires. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been previously used in this problem domain to track and monitor wildfires with approaches such as artificial potential fields and reinforcement learning. Our work aims to look at a team of UAVs, in a distributed approach, over an area to maximize the sensor coverage in dynamic wildfire environments. We proposed and implemented the Deep Q-Network (DQN) with a state estimator (auto-encoder), then compared it to existing methods including a Q-learning, a Q-learning with experience replay, and a DQN. The proposed DQN with a state estimator outperformed existing deep learning methods in terms of reward maximization and convergence.