Abstract

Wildfires exert a destructive influence on forest ecosystems. Precise positioning of the fire margin (large-scale fireline) of extensive wildfires facilitates the allocation of firefighting resources. However, the direct positioning of the entire fire field by a single unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) remains a formidable challenge due to the extensive horizontal expanse of large-scale firelines, and asynchronous monitoring of the entire fire field results in suboptimal accuracy as a consequence of the dynamic propagation of the fireline. To address these limitations, this paper presents a global positioning method for large-scale firelines employing a single UAV. By asynchronously locating part fireline through the UAV's airborne fireline real-time positioning system during UAV flight, the acquired asynchronous firelines are synchronized to the same time utilizing a fire spread prediction model, ultimately achieving global positioning of the firelines. The efficacy of the proposed method was validated using FARSITE-simulated wildfire data and two field-prefabricated wildfire experiment datasets. The outcomes demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms direct asynchronous positioning of the entire fireline by a single UAV in terms of accuracy.