ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection via Cooperative Agents in Robotic Systems

Abstract

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and disaster detection, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robots must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty that enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%, defined as the percentage of missions with true positive detections meeting the required confidence, excluding false positives and battery depletions. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.