Keywords
fire monitoring, UAV, unmanned aircraft
Abstract
Frequent and detailed updates of the development of a forest fire are essential for effective and safe fire fighting. Since a forest fire is typically inaccessible by ground vehicles due to mountainous terrain, small Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as a promising solution to the problem of monitoring large forest fires. In this paper we present an effective path planning algorithm for a UAV utilizing infrared images that are collected on-board in realtime. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our path planning algorithm in realistic scenarios, we implemented the forest fire propagation model EMBYR to simulate the time evolution of a typical forest fire. We also introduce a new cooperative control mission concept where multiple Low- Altitude, Short-Endurance (LASE) UAVs are used for fire monitoring. By simultaneously deploying multiple UAVs, the effectiveness of the mission in terms of information update rate can be improved dramatically.
Original Publication Citation
Casbeer, D., Beard, R., Li, S., McLain, T., and Mehra, R. Forest Fire Monitoring Using Unmanned Air Vehicles, Proceedings of the American Control Conference, pp. 3530-3535, June 2005, Portland, Oregon. DOI: 10.1109/ACC.2005.1470520
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Casbeer, David W.; Beard, Randal W.; McLain, Timothy W.; Li, Sai-Ming; and Mehra, Raman K., "Forest fire monitoring with multiple small UAVs" (2005). Faculty Publications. 1506.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/1506
Document Type
Peer-Reviewed Article
Publication Date
2005-6
Permanent URL
http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/3431
Publisher
IEEE
Language
English
College
Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Copyright Status
(c) 2005 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.
Copyright Use Information
http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/