Forest Fire Monitoring Through a Network of Aerial Drones and Sensors

With the technological advances in recent years, elements such as aerial drones and its sensors are becoming increasingly accessible, smaller, transportable and also more stable in flight. Aerial drone fleets are ideally suited to monitor an active forest fire and to support firefighting teams on duty. In this paper we propose a system to support fire monitoring, built using a Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly called aerial drones, focused on collecting data from firefighters on duty, in wildfires' context. This system provides the sensing of a fire perimeter, and monitors and follows the firefighters while they are on duty. This system is validated both through simulation and through real-life experiments performed with a FANET of three UAVs. The results obtained in these experiments show that the proposed algorithms have good performance, and that the corresponding system is able to support the firefighting mission in an autonomous approach.