UAVs for wildland fires

In the last decade, research was conducted to develop measurement solutions dedicated to forest fires and based on image processing and computer vision. Significant progress was achieved in developing such tools for fire propagation in controlled laboratory environments. However, these developments are not suitable for outdoor unstructured environments. Additionally, wildland fires cover large areas; this limits the use of vision-based ground systems. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with cameras for remote sensing are promising as their performance/price ratio is increasing over time. They can provide a low-cost alternative for the prevention, detection, propagation monitoring and real-time support for fire fighting. In this paper, we give an overview of past work dealing with the use of UAVs in the context of wildland and forest fires, and propose a framework based on cooperative UAVs and UGVs for fires monitoring on a larger scale.