Design and deployment of an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle for urban firefighting scenarios

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to execute missions that are either too complex or too dangerous for humans. In this paper, we address the design and deployment of an autonomous ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm for urban firefighting scenarios. We describe hardware and algorithm designs for autonomous navigation, planning, fire source identification and abatement in unstructured urban scenarios. Our approach employs on-board sensors for autonomous navigation and thermal camera information for source identification. A custom electro–mechanical pump is responsible to eject water for fire abatement. The proposed approach is validated through several experiments, where we show the ability to identify and abate a simulated fire source in a building. The whole system was developed and deployed during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020, for Challenge 3 – Fire Fighting Inside a High-Rise Building. Our approach was instrumental to win the first place in the MBZIRC Grand Challenge, which included the Challenge 3 as one its three tasks and it scored the highest number of points among all UGV solutions, while being the most compact one among all the teams.