Robotic Applications for Wildfire Management in the Wildland–Urban Interface: A Scoping Review

Wildfires are intensifying globally, with increasing impacts on wildland–urban interface (WUI) zones where human settlements meet flammable wildland vegetation. These hybrid landscapes pose challenges to fire management, including constrained access, synthetic fuel loads, and unpredictable ignition pathways. Robotic systems, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), and hybrid platforms, have emerged as promising tools for wildfire management. This scoping review synthesizes 34 interdisciplinary studies published between 2000 and 2025 to evaluate the current state of robotic technologies in WUI contexts, identifying key limitations and emerging solutions. Data are organized across robotic platform types, autonomy levels, sensing capabilities, and management phases, and synthesized into a thematic taxonomy linking robotic functions, WUI-specific engagements, and deployment barriers. The findings indicate that UAVs currently dominate applications, particularly in detection, monitoring, and recovery, while ground robots and hybrid teams remain less developed. Most robotic deployments are confined to simulations with limited integration into live incident workflows. Persistent challenges include short endurance, sensor degradation in smoke and heat, interoperability with incident command systems, and regulatory restrictions on deployment. The review expands this perspective by demonstrating how robotic sensing outputs can be transformed into model-ready data layers for civil infrastructure management and by framing robotic sensing within the full disaster-management life cycle. It illustrates how prehazard UAV/UGV inspections support mitigation and preparedness, event-time operations enhance evacuation routing and situational awareness, and posthazard missions deliver structural-damage, slope-stability, and infrastructure-restoration assessments. Emerging directions such as artificial intelligence-augmented sensing, digital-twin integration, multirobot coordination and human–robot teaming, and geospatial modeling point to pathways for enhancing WUI fire resilience. By positioning robotic systems as continuous data infrastructures that bridge prevention, response, and recovery, the review highlights the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, codesign with end-users, and supportive governance frameworks to transition robotics from experimental pilots to operational assets in wildfire-resilient communities.