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Tethered UAV with Combined Multi-rotor and Water Jet Propulsion for Forest Fire Fighting

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Abstract

Numerous research works, numerical simulations and real experiments have been dedicated to the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) before, during and after wildfire occurrences, for multiple purposes including terrain and vegetation mapping for fire risk assessment and prevention, surveillance, fire detection and monitoring, gathering data for a human decision-maker, assisting search and rescue operations, and burnt area mapping and post-disaster evaluation. However, very few works deal with the firefighting process using UAVs and most of these consider only simulation and planning methods but not actual concept implementation and validation. This work describes the design, construction and test of a novel light-weight tethered UAV with mixed multi-rotor and water jet propulsion for forest fire fighting. The challenges in conceiving such system are presented and discussed. This analysis leads to a set of requirements and specifications for the system. A full-scale realization of the UAV is presented and tested in the field in a simulated fire drill. It is demonstrated that taking advantage of the water jet propulsion combined with a multi-rotor propulsion contributes to increase the flight endurance.

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Funding

This research work was partially funded by the Project F3 - Desenvolvimento de um sistema de agulheta portante (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033616), co-financed by the European Fund for Regional Development through national funds (Compete2020 and Portugal2020). Project partners include Jacinto Marques de Oliveira, sucrs lda, ADAI, Sleeklab and Functional Category.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Association for the Development of Industrial Aerodynamics, Univ. Coimbra, PT-3030-289, Coimbra, Portugal

    Carlos Viegas, Babak Chehreh, José Andrade & João Lourenço

Authors
  1. Carlos Viegas
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  2. Babak Chehreh
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  3. José Andrade
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  4. João Lourenço
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Contributions

Carlos Viegas developed the theory, conceived and planned the experiments, took the lead in writing the manuscript. Babak Chehreh performed part of the analytic calculations, performed the numerical simulations and contributed to the interpretation of the results. José Andrade and João Lourenço designed and produced components for the UAV nozzle and performed the experiments. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript. The following people have supported the prototype development and testing: Guilherme Mogas, Rafael Batista, Ernesto Rebelo, Jacinto Reis, João Loureiro, Bruno Gouveia and Jorge Raposo.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carlos Viegas.

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Viegas, C., Chehreh, B., Andrade, J. et al. Tethered UAV with Combined Multi-rotor and Water Jet Propulsion for Forest Fire Fighting. J Intell Robot Syst 104, 21 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01532-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01532-w

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