This full-day workshop will showcase the cutting edge of research and practice in autonomous robotics for the management and control of wildland fire. Wildland fire management presents daunting challenges due to unstructured uncertainty, scale, and complex multiscale nonlinear interactions between the process and its environment. This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners working to advance the integration of heterogeneous autonomous robots across all stages of wildland fire management through multidisciplinary work in guidance, navigation, control, sensing, computer vision, communications, novel design, security, high fidelity computation, operations, policy, and beyond.
While deliberations will center on wildland fire resiliency, the scope of this forum will extend to broader questions concerning robotics and health of the wildland fire ecosystem and climate science. Broad areas of interest for technical content to be presented in the workshop are as follows: autonomous robotics missions in wildland life; multi-agent autonomy; human-robot teaming; flight under the canopy; communication and coordination; computer vision, machine learning and AI; online decision making; novel design in ground, air and space; advances in sensing and data fusion; lifecycle of wildland fire: needs and policy; and, role of robotics in climate science.
The workshop will follow a mixed format, interlacing technical presentations with panels and audience interaction. In this manner, content will be presented to the audience in blocks, followed by engaging conversation among all participants. Expert talks and panels will feature prominent members of the wildland fire operations and research communities.
