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Fire Monitoring with a Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

When it comes to wildfire surveillance missions, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a safer alternative over manned aircraft in such dangerous flight conditions. Furthermore, the efficiency of fixed-wing UAVs, as compared to multi-rotors platforms, makes them more desirable for prolonged missions with sustained surveillance. Therefore, while previous research has explored autonomous monitoring of fires with multi-rotor UAVs, this work focuses on developing an approach for fire monitoring with a fixed-wing UAV. In order to autonomously track the fire as it propagates, images of the fire from an on-board IR camera are first processed to extract an edge of the fire front. The proposed algorithm then guides the UAV to fly towards the fire front and track it, by obtaining a reference point located on the extracted fire edge, and using L1 guidance law to command the aircraft. Furthermore, as the UAV navigates around the fire, a map of the fire is constructed on-board the vehicle, using a fire occupancy grid map to denote the probability of a fire in each cell. Results from two simulations, with fire data obtained from WRF-Fire simulations, demonstrate the ability for the UAV to autonomously track the propagating fire, regardless of its shape or scale, and maintain a map of the fire on-board the vehicle.