Use of Fire-Extinguishing Balls for a Conceptual System of Drone-Assisted Wildfire Fighting

Abstract

This paper examines the potential use of fire extinguishing balls as part of a proposed system, where drone and remote-sensing technologies are utilized cooperatively as a supplement to traditional firefighting methods. The proposed system consists of (1) scouting unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to detect spot fires and monitor the risk of wildfire approaching a building, fence, and/or firefighting crew via remote sensing, (2) communication UAS to establish and extend the communication channel between scouting UAS and fire-fighting UAS, and (3) a fire-fighting UAS autonomously traveling to the waypoints to drop fire extinguishing balls (environmental friendly, heat activated suppressants). This concept is under development through a transdisciplinary multi-institutional project. The scope of this paper encloses general illustration of this design, and the experiments conducted so far to evaluate fire extinguishing balls. The results of the experiments show that smaller size fire extinguishing balls available in the global marketplace attached to drones might not be effective in aiding in building fires (unless there are open windows in the buildings already). On the contrary, results show that even the smaller size fire extinguishing balls might be effective in extinguishing short grass fires (around 0.5 kg size ball extinguished a circle of 1-meter of short grass). This finding guided the authors towards wildfire fighting rather than building fires. The paper also demonstrates building of heavy payload drones (around 15 kg payload), and the progress of development of an apparatus carrying fire-extinguishing balls attachable to drones.

A Survey on Robotic Technologies for Forest Firefighting: Applying Drone Swarms to Improve Firefighters’ Efficiency and Safety

“…A common idea for putting out fires is the utilization of extinguishing balls [43]. These elements burst when they come into contact with high temperatures, releasing some chemical components that put out the fire.…”

Autonomous Fire Fighting with a UAV-UGV Team at MBZIRC 2020

“…While UGVs can carry larger amounts of extinguishing agents or drag a fire hose [8], payload limitations impede the utility of UAVs. Hence, Aydin et al [9] investigated the deployment of fireextinguishing balls by a UAV. Ando et al [10] developed an aerial hose pipe robot using steerable pressurized water jets for robot motion and fire extinguishing.…”

RescueAR: Augmented Reality Supported Collaboration for UAV Driven Emergency Response Systems

“…Technological advancements have enabled Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) to evolve from manual to semi-autonomous to near fully autonomous operations [22]. As a result, they have gained in popularity as surveillance, delivery, photography, and emergency rescue tools, with state of the art emergency response teams exploring the use of smart UAVs for public safety operations such as search and rescue [30,52], firefighting [11,27], surveillance [14,51], and disaster relief [43]. While technological advances allow UAVs to operate independently, human supervision with timely interventions are still necessary to ensure their ethical and safe operations.…”