Aerial Assistance System for Automated Firefighting during Turntable Ladder Operations

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated firefighting assistance system combining UAV-based heat source localization with a motorized fire monitor on a turntable ladder, improving accuracy and efficiency during industrial fire suppression.

Contribution

It introduces an integrated system that autonomously localizes fires and directs water jets, enhancing firefighting precision during complex industrial incidents.

Findings

Successfully localized multiple heat sources in preliminary tests.

Automatically directed water jets towards detected fires.

Demonstrated feasibility of UAV-assisted firefighting in industrial settings.

Abstract

Fires in industrial facilities pose special challenges to firefighters, e.g., due to the sheer size and scale of the buildings. The resulting visual obstructions impair firefighting accuracy, further compounded by inaccurate assessments of the fire's location. Such imprecision simultaneously increases the overall damage and prolongs the fire-brigades operation unnecessarily. We propose an automated assistance system for firefighting using a motorized fire monitor on a turntable ladder with aerial support from an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The UAV flies autonomously within an obstacle-free flight funnel derived from geodata, detecting and localizing heat sources. An operator supervises the operation on a handheld controller and selects a fire target in reach. After the selection, the UAV automatically plans and traverses between two triangulation poses for continued fire localization. Simultaneously, our system steers the fire monitor to ensure the water jet reaches the detected heat source. In preliminary tests, our assistance system successfully localized multiple heat sources and directed a water jet towards the fires.