A Decentralized Importance-based Multi-UAV Path Planning Algorithm for Wildfire Monitoring

Wildfire monitoring is a highly important task in preventing the potential damages caused by this disastrous event. In wildfire monitoring, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has gained significant attention from researchers and practitioners worldwide in recent years. While different UAV-based wildfire monitoring systems have been proposed in the past, a few of them consider decentralized computation and take into account the uneven spatiotemporal propagation nature of wildfires in their proposed solutions. This paper presents a decentralized and importance-based multi-UAV path planning algorithm for wildfire monitoring. We describe the algorithm design, implementation, and use simulation to evaluate its performance. Experiment results show the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized algorithm for importance-based wildfire monitoring.