Forest fires are one of the most serious natural disasters that threaten forest resources. The early and accurate identification of forest fires is crucial for reducing losses. Compared with satellites and sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are widely used in forest fire monitoring tasks due to their flexibility and wide coverage. The key to fire monitoring is to accurately segment the area where the fire is located in the image. However, for early forest fire monitoring, fires captured remotely by UAVs have the characteristics of a small area, irregular contour, and susceptibility to forest cover, making the accurate segmentation of fire areas from images a challenge. This article proposes an FBC-ANet network architecture that integrates boundary enhancement modules and context-aware modules into a lightweight encoder–decoder network. FBC-Anet can extract deep semantic features from images and enhance shallow edge features, thereby achieving an effective segmentation of forest fire areas in the image. The FBC-ANet model uses an Xception network as the backbone of an encoder to extract features of different scales from images. By transforming the extracted deep semantic features through the CIA module, the model’s feature learning ability for fire pixels is enhanced, making feature extraction more robust. FBC-ANet integrates the decoder into the BEM module to enhance the extraction of shallow edge features in images. The experimental results indicate that the FBC-ANet model has a better segmentation performance for small target forest fires compared to the baseline model. The segmentation accuracy on the dataset FLAME is 92.19%, the F1 score is 90.76%, and the IoU reaches 83.08%. This indicates that the FBC-ANet model can indeed extract more valuable features related to fire in the image, thereby better segmenting the fire area from the image.
Challenges in trajectory planning are encountered by fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms operating in environments with unknown obstacles. In this study, a distributed real-time trajectory-planning method that integrates a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) framework with an adaptive Gaussian collocation strategy (DA-GCMPC) was developed. This method leverages a distributed iterative computational framework based on DMPC to reformulate trajectory planning as an optimal control problem. To address the fixed-resolution limitation of conventional distributed MPC formulations, a complexity-aware adaptive collocation mechanism is introduced. The novelty of the method lies in adapting the collocation transcription resolution of each local MPC problem according to the instantaneous planning complexity. This mechanism selects the collocation type online according to maneuvering demand, obstacle density risk, and neighboring-UAV interaction risk, enabling the planner to balance real-time computation and constraint-handling capability under limited perception. We decomposed the UAV energy consumption and formulated the total energy consumption of the swarm as the objective function. An optimal control sequence was derived using the Gaussian collocation method by integrating obstacle avoidance constraints for fixed-wing UAVs and environmental limitations. Comparative simulations against the implemented fixed-discretization interior-point and SQP baselines showed that the proposed DA-GCMPC method achieved lower computation time and better trajectory quality metrics under the tested simulation settings, with average per-step computation times below 80 ms. In addition, an eight-UAV semi-physical hardware-in-the-loop validation was conducted to verify the real-time executability of the proposed method in a closed-loop flight control system.