Design and Deployment of an Autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Urban Firefighting Scenarios

TL;DR

This paper presents the design, development, and successful deployment of an autonomous ground robot equipped with a robotic arm and thermal sensors for urban firefighting, demonstrating high performance in competitive scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel integrated system combining hardware and algorithms for autonomous firefighting in unstructured urban environments, validated through real-world competitions.

Findings

Successfully identified and abated a heat source in a building

Achieved top scores in the MBZIRC 2020 firefighting challenge

Demonstrated effective autonomous navigation and fire source detection

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots have the potential to solve missions that are either too complex or dangerous to be accomplished by humans. In this paper, we address the design and autonomous deployment of a ground vehicle equipped with a robotic arm for urban firefighting scenarios. We describe the hardware design and algorithm approaches for autonomous navigation, planning, fire source identification and abatement in unstructured urban scenarios. The approach employs on-board sensors for autonomous navigation and thermal camera information for source identification. A custom electro{mechanical pump is responsible to eject water for fire abatement. The proposed approach is validated through several experiments, where we show the ability to identify and abate a sample heat source in a building. The whole system was developed and deployed during the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC) 2020, for Challenge No. 3 Fire Fighting Inside a High-Rise Building and during the Grand Challenge where our approach scored the highest number of points among all UGV solutions and was instrumental to win the first place.