Bushfire surveillance using dynamic priority maps and swarming unmanned aerial vehicles

Bushfires are large or destructive conflagrations that occur in areas of wilderness, their remote location serving as a barrier to rapid detection or response. As a result of their inaccessibility, these fires can grow to unsuppressible proportions and not only cause significant economic damage to an area, but also endanger the lives of communities and their fire fighters. Fast and effective detection and monitoring is a key factor in bushfire fighting, however the areas bush fires typically occur in are remote, with minimal to no communication infrastructure. Fire managers often have to rely on archaic information gathering methods such as fire towers and physical patrols by fire fighters at the scene. Having accurate knowledge of the status of a bushfire is indispensable for enabling accurate fire prediction modelling, maintaining the safety of fire fighting crews and allowing efforts to be focused on areas of the highest risk such as urban areas with strong human presence. This problem is ideal for the application of multiple, small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The advantages of deploying UAVs as a swarm include massive scalability, low communication overheads, reduced need for human supervision, and resilience against individual failure. For deployment of multiple UAVs to be practical, a method for controlling their actions autonomously and cooperatively is required. This dissertation presents a swarm intelligence approach to exhaustive and continuous surveillance of large areas. Digital pheromone maps are used to represent the environment, facilitating both information sharing and collective decision making. Individual pheromone maps, stored on-board, are communicated via short range, peer to peer broadcasts, allowing for environmental knowledge to be synchronised and spread through the swarm. This enables emergent coordination in an area without the infrastructure needed to provide global communication, and the resilience against loss of individual vehicles that operations in the vicinity of unpredictable and volatile bushfires requires.