Intelligent Path Planning and Following for UAVs in Forest Surveillance and Fire Fighting Missions

As a flexible, efficient, and powerful platform for a variety of practical applications, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) has attracted increasing attention in the field of forest fire monitoring, detection, and tracking in recent years. In forest surveillance and fire fighting missions, threats may occur when a UAV is assigned to fly over a forest area, as statical obstacles like hills may stand between the base and the fire spot, and dynamic obstacles like birds may appear during the flight. To deal with these challenges, a path planning algorithm that can learn the terrain environment and generate the motion policy to plan an optimal path is developed. A hierarchical structure is adopted for path planning to achieve the optimal result in a global manner, as well as avoid the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, an intelligent path following algorithm that can perceive and avoid dynamic obstacles is also developed for the UAV to accomplish the task safely. Numerical simulations are conducted to validate the proposed algorithms.