Role of Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems in Prescribed Burn Projects

This short paper describes the potential for use of autonomous multi-UAS teams during all stages of a prescribed burn. The current state of practice of prescribed burning is labor intensive and based on numerous simplifying assumptions. UAS teams promise to increase efficiency and effectiveness, while creating the opportunity to develop new science related to fire behavior. Ingrained in the proposed UAS mission profiles is bi-directional feedback between sensing and computational components at multiple timescales, which is a hallmark of the Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS) framework.