Experimental results of automatic fire detection and monitoring with UAVs

Abstract

This paper presents some experiments on automatic fire detection and monitoring with a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The work has been carried out in the framework of the project “COMETS: Real-time coordination and control of multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles” (IST-2001-34304) of the IST Programme of the European Commission. Instead of using a single expensive UAV, the approach adopted in COMETS has been the cooperation of several low cost UAVs. The COMETS demonstrations involved the integration of 3 heterogeneous UAVs: the helicopter Marvin, the airship Karma, and the helicopter Heliv. The UAVs were equipped with heterogeneous sensors including one visual and one infrared micro-camera (Heliv) and a punctual fire sensor (Marvin). The capabilities and performance of the COMETS system were demonstrated in several experiments on automatic fire detection, confirmation, localisation and monitoring. The experiments organized in Lousa (Portugal) in May 2003, May 2004 and May 2005 demonstrated the capabilities of the COMETS system. The paper includes a brief description of the COMETS system and presents some experimental results.