Only You (And Now Robots) Can Prevent Forest Fires

One of the major impacts of climatic changes is due to destroying of forest. Destroying of forest takes place in many ways but the majority of the forest is destroyed due to wild forest fires. Applying robots to the problem may help reduce the destructive fires from occurring, and minimize the damage when they do start.  

That’s the argument made by computer scientists M.P.Sivaram Kumar and S. Rajasekaran in a recent article in theJournal of Computing entitled “Path Planning Algorithm for Extinguishing Forest Fires.”

In the paper the authors have presented a path planning algorithm for extinguishing fires  which uses Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) for detecting fires. Since most of the works on forest fires are based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and a collection of work has been done on coverage, messagetransmission, deployment of nodes, battery power depletion of sensor nodes in WSNs we focused our work in path planning approach of the Actor to move to the target area where the fire has occurred and extinguish it. 

An incremental approach is presented in order to determine the successive moves of the Actor to extinguish fire in an environment with and without obstacles. This is done by comparing the moves determined with target location readings obtained using sensors until the Actor reaches the target area to extinguish fires. 

The vast majority of forests are destroyed by wild forest fires, and current methods of forest stewardship —namely individual personnel on foot patrol — are grossly inefficient in identifying emerging threats.

Kumar and Rajasekaran argue that deploying robotic systems throughout wooded areas will increase firefighters’ ability to identify emerging threats and more effectively plot the path of a wildfire and then deploy the appropriate resources to the right places. They imagine a grid-based system of automated drones, designed to detect abnormal changes in temperature and relay data back to a command center.

Potentially drones, and robots like SAFFiR, or other projects resulting from DARPA's Robotics Challenge will be combined with algorithms like those suggested by this study to work together with humans in the future to prevent forest fires.  Sorry Smokey, looks like you might have just been a victim of technological obsolescence too!

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