Collective intelligence and bush fire spotting

Bush fires cause major damage each year in many areas of the world and the earlier that they can be detected the easier it is to minimize this damage. This paper describes a collective intelligence algorithm that performs localized rather than centralized control of a number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that can survey complex areas for fires, devoting attention in proportion to the user specified importance of each area. Simulation shows that not only is the algorithm able to perform this action successfully, it is also able to automatically adapt to a simulated malfunction in one of the UAVs.