Forest fires are becoming a huge issue that have the ability to destroy countless lives and property. The key to mitigating the destructuive force of forest fires is early detection and response. Autonomous drones that can continuously scan remote, inaccessible regions for the smallest sign of a fire would be invaluable. An additional key feature of these drones would be to carry water tanks to swarm around the fire and begin extinguishing it before human firefighters can reach the area.
  With this project we aimed to research the use of swarm robotic motion algorithms in the detection and response to forrest fires. To simplify the problem we used small mobile ground robots to replace large drones, a flashlight to replace a fire, and an eye-in-the-sky vision system to replace GPS and provide location data to each robot. However, many of the lesons and motion planning software developed for this system can be extrapolated for drone use in a real-world larger setting.