Distributed robots detect wildfires quickly and safely with cooperation
D3ARC: Time-Critical Distributed Disaster Detection for Asynchronous Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems
RoboticsArtificial IntelligenceComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionMultiagent Systems
Summary
Wildfires are dangerous and spread quickly, making early detection very important. The authors created a system called D3ARC where multiple robots work together to find wildfires as fast as possible. Each robot senses the environment and decides what to do, while a remote controller guides all their movements. The robots share information, plan ahead, and navigate safely, which helps them spot fires with high confidence and speed. Tests show this approach can detect wildfires reliably and efficiently in simulations.
wildfire detectionmulti-robot systemsdistributed perceptionasynchronous communicationhierarchical frameworkcooperative roboticssituational awarenesstime-critical operationsrobot navigationsimulation evaluation
Authors
Nikolaos Koursioumpas, Lina Magoula, Nancy Alonistioti, Ramin Khalili
Abstract
Climate change is increasing the severity and unpredictability of natural disasters. In time-critical crises such as wildfires, traditional monitoring practices remain limited by coverage, cost, and personnel risk, paving the way for autonomous and adaptive monitoring solutions. Within this context, this paper introduces D3ARC, an asynchronous distributed hierarchical framework for time-aware and reliable wildfire detection. D3ARC integrates multiple robotic agents that cooperate under uncertainty through distributed perception, shared situational awareness and coordinated actions. A remote controller asynchronously decides upon each robot's motion, while each robotic agent senses the environment and decides where and how to execute the wildfire detection. All robotic operations require time, and as time progresses, wildfires continue to spread, reducing the opportunity for early intervention. As such, all agents share a common objective: to detect a wildfire with a certain performance threshold as fast as possible and within a time limit. D3ARC integrates mechanisms for safe navigation, coverage efficiency, cooperation and reliability. It introduces a forward-looking capability that allows agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons, achieving an overall mission success up to 94% with 89.4% detection confidence.