Coordinated Autonomous Drones for Human-Centered Fire Evacuation in Partially Observable Urban Environments
Autonomous drone technology holds significant promise for enhancing search and rescue operations during evacuations by guiding humans toward safety and supporting broader emergency response efforts. However, their application in dynamic, real-time evacuation support remains limited. Existing models often overlook the psychological and emotional complexity of human behavior under extreme stress. In real-world fire scenarios, evacuees frequently deviate from designated safe routes due to panic and uncertainty. To address these challenges, this paper presents a multi-agent coordination framework in which autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) assist human evacuees in real-time by locating, intercepting, and guiding them to safety under uncertain conditions. We model the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), where two heterogeneous UAV agents, a high-level rescuer (HLR) and a low-level rescuer (LLR), coordinate through shared observations and complementary capabilities. Human behavior is captured using an agent-based model grounded in empirical psychology, where panic dynamically affects decision-making and movement in response to environmental stimuli. The environment features stochastic fire spread, unknown evacuee locations, and limited visibility, requiring UAVs to plan over long horizons to search for humans and adapt in real-time. Our framework employs the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm with recurrent policies to enable robust decision-making in partially observable settings. Simulation results demonstrate that the UAV team can rapidly locate and intercept evacuees, significantly reducing the time required for them to reach safety compared to scenarios without UAV assistance.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Accountability in Autonomous Drone-Based Firefighting: Insights From a Field Trial
There is a growing research field exploring how autonomous drones can enhance emergency response effectiveness. Integrating these (artificial) agents into existing emergency teams and workflows may significantly impact e…
Coordinated Control of UAVs for Human-Centered Active Sensing of Wildfires
Fighting wildfires is a precarious task, imperiling the lives of engaging firefighters and those who reside in the fire's path. Firefighters need online and dynamic observation of the firefront to anticipate a wildfire's…
From Ad Hoc Pilots to Repeatable Patterns: Structuring Drone Collaboration in Emergency Services with DroneLets
Drones hold promise for supporting emergency services, but their integration into workflows remains ad hoc and coordination-intensive. This paper addresses two research questions: how emergency teams want to collaborate …
Relative Positioning for Aerial Robot Path Planning in GPS Denied Environment
One of the most useful applications of intelligent aerial robots sometimes called Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in Australia is known to be in bushfire monitoring and prediction operations. A swarm of autonomous drones/…
Flying Together: Human-Guided Immersive Shared Control for Aerial Robot Teams in Unknown Environments
While autonomous multi-robots can achieve safe and coordinated navigation, they often struggle to adapt to unforeseen conditions and to capture operator-driven objectives in unstructured environments. We present a Virtua…
Robot Navigation