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An Unmanned Aircraft System for Automatic Forest Fire Monitoring and Measurement

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Abstract

The paper presents an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), consisting of several aerial vehicles and a central station, for forest fire monitoring. Fire monitoring is defined as the computation in real-time of the evolution of the fire front shape and potentially other parameters related to the fire propagation, and is very important for forest fire fighting. The paper shows how an UAS can automatically obtain this information by means of on-board infrared or visual cameras. Moreover, it is shown how multiple aerial vehicles can collaborate in this application, allowing to cover bigger areas or to obtain complementary views of a fire. The paper presents results obtained in experiments considering actual controlled forest fires in quasi-operational conditions, involving a fleet of three vehicles, two autonomous helicopters and one blimp.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Pablo de Olavide University, Crta. Utrera, km.1, 41013, Seville, Spain

    Luis Merino

  2. Escuela Superior de Ingenieros, Universidad de Sevilla, Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092, Sevilla, Spain

    Fernando Caballero, J. Ramiro Martínez-de-Dios, Iván Maza & Aníbal Ollero

  3. Center for Advanced Aerospace Technology (CATEC), Parque Tecnológico y Aeronáutico de Andalucía, C. Wilbur y Orville Wright 17-19-21, 41309, La Rinconada, Spain

    Aníbal Ollero

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  1. Luis Merino
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  2. Fernando Caballero
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  3. J. Ramiro Martínez-de-Dios
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  4. Iván Maza
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  5. Aníbal Ollero
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Correspondence to Luis Merino.

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Merino, L., Caballero, F., Martínez-de-Dios, J.R. et al. An Unmanned Aircraft System for Automatic Forest Fire Monitoring and Measurement. J Intell Robot Syst 65, 533–548 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-011-9560-x

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