Autonomous fire-fighting with heterogeneous team of unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper addresses autonomous fire-fighting missions with a heterogeneous team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). We use UAVs with different capabilities to extinguish cooper- atively fires on the ground and on facades of high-rise buildings. The former is done by deploying fireproof blankets, whereas a water-jet system is used to extinguish fires on building facades. First, we propose two novel mechanisms on board UAVs for fire extinction: a system to deploy a blanket on the ground automatically, and a device to shoot water at facade fires. Then, we describe our software architecture for cooperative multi-robot missions in outdoor and unstructured environments, where robustness and reliability play a key role. The system was particularly developed for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), where we achieved the best performance in the fire-fighting Challenge. However, the conceptual design of our extinguishing devices and our software architecture are more general and could be applied to other search and rescue situations. We present not only our results in the final stage of MBZIRC but also our simulations and field experiments throughout the months previous to the competition, during which we assessed our system and tuned its performance.