Phoenix: Aerial Monitoring for Fighting Wildfires

Abstract

Wildfires have become a global problem in recent years. Authorities are looking for various technological and auxiliary solutions to deal with this environmental crisis. One of the advances being utilized in the forest fire field and its aftermath is unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs play a fundamental role in wildfire-fighting solutions due to their ease of use and high accessibility. However, the energy constraints of a single UAV and the fire areas make monitoring challenging. Therefore, to address these issues, we propose a monitoring application called Phoenix. We make three main contributions with the Phoenix application. Firstly, we implement a monitoring application consisting of path planning, graph engine, and modified TSP algorithms to help the UAV’s fire tracking and shorten its route. Secondly, we develop a network architecture to transfer the tracking data we obtained to provide information to the fire brigade and other firefighting units. Thirdly, we provide energy optimization for a single UAV mission. The first part of the application uses the elliptical fire model and simulation. In addition, Phoenix utilizes fuel moisture content (fmc) data of the fire zone to analyze the critical fire regions. The simulation results show that our Phoenix application reduces energy consumption by 38 % and enhances coverage by up to 51%.

Keywords

• wildfire surveillance
• fuel moisture content
• path planning
• energy efficiency
• drone coverage