Abstract
Forest firefighting missions encompass multiple tasks related to prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing. This work presents a complete survey of firefighters on the current problems in their work and the potential technological solutions. Additionally, it reviews the efforts performed by the academy and industry to apply different types of robots in the context of firefighting missions. Finally, all this information is used to propose a concept of operation for the comprehensive application of drone swarms in firefighting. The proposed system is a fleet of quadcopters that individually are only able to visit waypoints and use payloads, but collectively can perform tasks of surveillance, mapping, monitoring, etc. Three operator roles are defined, each one with different access to information and functions in the mission: mission commander, team leaders, and team members. These operators take advantage of virtual and augmented reality interfaces to intuitively get the information of the scenario and, in the case of the mission commander, control the drone swarm.
Highlights
Forest fires are one of the most common and, at the same time, serious emergencies facing humanity
The information provided by several space agencies supports this thesis: the European Space Agency (ESA) publishes the World Fire Atlas with the information collected by ATSR-2 [2] and Sentinel-3 [3]), whereas the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) does the same with the Global Fire Atlas [4]
After analyzing the current state of firefighting operations and proposals of robotic systems to perform them, we present a comprehensive concept of operation to apply drone swarms in firefighting missions
Summary
Forest fires are one of the most common and, at the same time, serious emergencies facing humanity. According to the World Fire Statistics [1], a report published by the International Association of Fire and Rescue Services that collects data from multiple governments, there were 4.5 million fires and 30,800 deaths in countries with 2700 million inhabitants in 2018, which means 1.7 fires per 1000 and 1.1 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants that year. These figures do not take into account the whole world, they allow us to quantify the magnitude of the problem.
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