Cooperative control of multiple UAVs for forest fire monitoring and detection

This paper proposes to use multiple cooperative unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for forest monitoring, fire detection and tracking of its propagation. The proposed algorithm solves the problems of forest fire by including three stages of search, confirmation and observation. During the search stage, the UAVs team moves in a certain formation shape in a leader-follower approach, a distributed sliding mode formation control is designed to keep the desired formation shape during this stage. Once a fire is detected, all sensory data will be sent to the ground station. A new reference trajectory is calculated according to the fire spread model for generating an elliptic fire perimeter. The team begins following the new fire trajectory, afterward the leader will send reconfiguration commands to followers. Therefore, a distributed reconfigurable controller is designed based on sliding mode control (SMC) which converts the formation problem from 2-D Cartesian frame of reference to the Polar frame of reference. This algorithm is used for evenly distributing and tracking UAVs team for elliptical fire perimeter. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using a six degree-of-freedom (DOF) quadrotor dynamic model and a simplified fire front model.