Fire monitoring

The intended operational environment is over the open field, or near inhabited zones.

Real-time monitoring of the evolution of the fire is very useful for forest fire fighting. This monitoring involves dynamic information about the fire front and other parameters such as the flame height and the fire front width. Furthermore, the computation of the distances from the fire to the fighting means, houses, roads and utilities is also important.

Aerial cameras are usually deployed on board of conventional aerial means (helicopters, airplanes). Fligths near the fire, with low visibility conditions due to the smoke, could involve significant risk. The use of smaller UAVs avoid these risks and decrease the operational costs.

Involving several UAVs will provide additional information. A fleet of UAV could perform several tasks including: to determine the fire front position over a wide range, to determine other geometric characteristics of the fire, such as the flame height, to gather and transmitt images of the fire in real-time, from different points of view and different modalities (Infrared and visual), to provide assistance to fire-fighters.

Fire monitoring video recorded from a teleoperated helicopter.

The information obtained can be combined with GIS data to help to the management of the fire fighting activities, and also to post-fire analysis.

The UAVs can deploy several cameras of different modalities to observe the scene from several points of view.

In the figure, four photos of the same fire ignition from different points of view and using both IR and visual cameras are shown. Analyzing the IR and visual images (see preliminary results section), the important features of the fire can be extracted, and using the sensory data of the UAV, the fire can be precisely located.