Proof-of-Concept Swarm of Self-Organising Drones Aimed at Fighting Wildfires

Swarm robotics and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) technology have been progressing at an increasingly fast pace for the past two decades, thus extending their capabilities and the kinds of problems they can help tackle. UAVs can now be equipped with a range of advanced devices and sensors which enable them to navigate remote areas and to operate in dangerous environments. Given the hazardous nature of the activity, fighting fires by means of disposable and relatively inexpensive robots in place of humans is of special interest. In addition, the use of fleets of decentralised cooperative and self-organising robots results in a robust and resilient system with distributed decision-making which can cope with uncertainty, errors, and the failure or loss of a few nonessential units without jeopardising the overall mission. This paper comprises an initial proof-of-concept to demonstrate the feasibility and tremendous potential of employing swarm robotics to fight fires autonomously. Thus, an efficient yet realistic model of the spread of fire is developed, which is then coupled with a model of a fleet of self-organising drones whose coordination mechanism is based on a forgetful particle swarm algorithm.