Unmanned aerial vehicle for fire surveillance and monitoring

[ES] Los incendios forestales siguen siendo uno de los grandes problemas ambientales a los que se enfrenta la sociedad en la actualidad. Además del gran impacto medioambiental, la destrucción de ecosistemas y las posibles pérdidas humanas, hay que añadir los costes económicos derivados de la lucha contra el fuego. Todos estos motivos han provocado que se busque en la tecnología actual, herramientas y sistemas que permitan ayudar en tareas de la lucha contra incendios y, más en concreto, el uso de Vehículos Aéreos No Tripulados (UAVs). El hecho de que los UAVs puedan alcanzar lugares remotos de manera rápida y, embarcar sensores y dispositivos que ayuden en tareas peligrosas y arriesgadas, los hacen idóneos para la lucha contra el fuego. En este trabajo recoge el desarrollo, en colaboración con Telefónica Digital España, de una aplicación innovadora haciendo uso de la tecnología más actual presente en la robótica, en la cual un dron es capaz de realizar tareas de vigilancia y monitorización de incendios de manera autónoma, gracias a los sensores y dispositivos embarcados en el mismo. Además, se implementa una interfaz gráfica que permita el intercambio de información entre la aeronave y el usuario en tierra.[EN] Forest fires continue to be one of the major environmental problems facing society today. In addition to the high environmental impact, the destruction of ecosystems and possible human losses, the economic costs of fire-fighting must be added. All these reasons have led to the search, in current technology, for tools and systems to help in fire-fighting tasks and, more specifically, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The fact that UAVs can reach remote locations quickly and embark on sensors anddevices to assist in dangerous and risky tasks makes them ideal for firefighting. This work includes the development, in collaborationwith Telefónica Digital España, of an effective tool using current technology present in robotics, in which a drone is capable of carrying out fire surveillance and monitoring tasks autonomously, thanks to the sensors and devices on board. In addition, a graphical interface is implemented that allows the exchange of information between the aircraft and the ground user.Este trabajo es financiado por el gobierno de la Comunidad de Madrid a traves de la Beca Doctorado Industrial (BECA ´ IND2017/TIC-7834). El laboratorio de Sistemas Inteligentes agradece TELEFONICA DIGITAL ESPANA, S.L.U. su ayuda y financiaci ˜ on a ´ traves del proyecto: ”Sistemas de UAV Aut ´ onomo para Super- ´ vision de Incendios Forestales”.Madridano, Á.; Campos, S.; Al-Kaff, A.; García, F.; Martín, D.; Escalera, A. (2020). Vehículo aéreo no tripulado para vigilancia y monitorización de incendios. Revista Iberoamericana de Automática e Informática industrial. 17(3). https://doi.org/10.4995/riai.2020.11806OJS263173Al-Ka, A., Moreno, F. M., de la Escalera, A., Armingol, J. M., 2017. Intelligent vehicle for search, rescue and transportation purposes. In: 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR). IEEE, pp. 110-115. https://doi.org/10.1109/SSRR.2017.8088148Albani, D., Nardi, D., Trianni, V., 2017. Field coverage and weed mapping by uav swarms. In: 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). 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IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/TASE.2018.2867614Imdoukh, A., Shaker, A., Al-Toukhy, A., Kablaoui, D., El-Abd, M., 2017. Semiautonomous indoor firefighting uav. In: 2017 18th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR). IEEE, pp. 310-315. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICAR.2017.8023625Lottes, P., Khanna, R., Pfeifer, J., Siegwart, R., Stachniss, C., 2017. Uav-based crop and weed classification for smart farming. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, pp. 3024-3031. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2017.7989347Loureiro, M. L., Allo, M., 2018. Los incendios forestales y su impacto económico: Propuesta para una agenda investigadora. Revista Galega de Economía 27 (3), 129-142.Madridano, Á., Al-Kaff, A., Martín, D., et al., 2020. 3d trajectory planning method for uavs swarm in building emergencies. Sensors 20 (3), 642. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20030642Merino, L., Caballero, F., de Dios, J. R. M., Maza, I., Ollero, A., 2010. Automatic forest fire monitoring and measurement using unmanned aerial vehicles. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Congress on Forest Fire Research. Citeseer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3033-5_37Ostovar, A., Hellstrom, T., Ringdahl, O., 2016. Human detection based on infrared images in forestry environments. In: International Conference on Image Analysis and Recognition. Springer, pp. 175-182 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41501-7_20Pajares, G., 2015. Overview and current status of remote sensing applications based on unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs). Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing 81 (4), 281-330. https://doi.org/10.14358/PERS.81.4.281Pajares, G., Ruz, J. J., Lanillos, P., Guijarro, M., de la Cruz, J. M., Santos, M., 2008. Generacion de trayectorias y toma de decisiones para uavs. Revista Iberoamericana de Automática e Informática Industrial RIAI 5 (1), 83-92. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1697-7912(08)70125-0Qin, H., Cui, J. Q., Li, J., Bi, Y., Lan, M., Shan, M., Liu, W., Wang, K., Lin, F., Zhang, Y., et al., 2016. Design and implementation of an unmanned aerial vehicle for autonomous firefighting missions. In: 2016 12th IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation (ICCA). IEEE, pp. 62-67. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCA.2016.7505253Toriz, A., Raygoza, M., Martínez, D., 2017. Modelo de inclusion tecnológica uav para la prevención de trabajos de alto riesgo, en industrias de la construcción basado en la metodología ivas. Revista Iberoamericana de Automática e Informática industrial 14 (1), 94-103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riai.2016.09.004Yuan, C., Liu, Z., Zhang, Y., 2016. Vision-based forest fire detection in aerial images for firefighting using uavs. In: 2016 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS). IEEE, pp. 1200-1205. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS.2016.7502546Yuan, C., Liu, Z., Zhang, Y., 2017. 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Aerial Drone-based System for Wildfire Monitoring and Suppression

Wildfire, also known as forest fire or bushfire, being an uncontrolled fire crossing an area of combustible vegetation, has become an inherent natural feature of the landscape in many regions of the world. From local to global scales, wildfire has caused substantial social, economic and environmental consequences. Given the hazardous nature of wildfire, developing automated and safe means to monitor and fight the wildfire is of special interest. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), equipped with appropriate sensors and fire retardants, are available to remotely monitor and fight the area undergoing wildfires, thus helping fire brigades in mitigating the influence of wildfires. This thesis is dedicated to utilizing UAVs to provide automated surveillance, tracking and fire suppression services on an active wildfire event. Considering the requirement of collecting the latest information of a region prone to wildfires, we presented a strategy to deploy the estimated minimum number of UAVs over the target space with nonuniform importance, such that they can persistently monitor the target space to provide a complete area coverage whilst keeping a desired frequency of visits to areas of interest within a predefined time period. Considering the existence of occlusions on partial segments of the sensed wildfire boundary, we processed both contour and flame surface features of wildfires with a proposed numerical algorithm to quickly estimate the occluded wildfire boundary. To provide real-time situational awareness of the propagated wildfire boundary, according to the prior knowledge of the whole wildfire boundary is available or not, we used the principle of vector field to design a model-based guidance law and a model-free guidance law. The former is derived from the radial basis function approximated wildfire boundary while the later is based on the distance between the UAV and the sensed wildfire boundary. Both vector field based guidance laws can drive the UAV to converge to and patrol along the dynamic wildfire boundary. To effectively mitigate the impacts of wildfires, we analyzed the advancement based activeness of the wildfire boundary with a signal prominence based algorithm, and designed a preferential firefighting strategy to guide the UAV to suppress fires along the highly active segments of the wildfire boundary

Optimal Deployment of Air Vehicle as Communication Relay for Multiple Ground Vehicles

Heterogeneous teams of both air and ground mobile vehicles can combine the advantages of mobility, sensing capability, and operation time when performing complex tasks. However, when ground vehicles operate in cluttered environments with randomized obstacles, they may experience line of sight (LoS) obstructions and loss of communication due to those obstacles. To mitigate this issue, an airborne relay can be positioned in the vicinity of the ground vehicles to aid communication by establishing two-hop communication links between the vehicles. This thesis develops an analytical framework to calculate the probability of spanning a two-hop communication between a pair of ground vehicles deployed in a task space with obstacles at random locations and with random heights (i.e., a Poisson Forest) using an airborne relay at any location near the ground vehicles. It allows to provide the main result, the optimization of the airborne relay\u27s location in scenarios involving multiple ground vehicles. By considering the locations and heights of the ground vehicles and the airborne relay, the distance-dependent critical height describing the required height of an obstacle to block the LoS is established. To account for the dependence on distance, the blocking is modeled as an inhomogeneous Poisson point process, and the LoS probability is its void probability. When pairwise communication links are considered, the throughput (metric depending on the LoS probability and channel capacity) is used to determine when to deploy the airborne relay, and, when the airborne relay is deployed, its optimal 3-D location. When multiple ground vehicles are considered, the throughput of the links and the layout of the communication network formed by the vehicles are used to compute the optimal positioning of the airborne relay, thus enhancing the overall throughput and connectivity of the network. The results are illustrated considering two obstacle height distributions: uniform and truncated Gaussian

System Architectures for Cooperative Teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Interacting Physically with the Environment

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become quite a useful tool for a wide range of applications, from inspection & maintenance to search & rescue, among others. The capabilities of a single UAV can be extended or complemented by the deployment of more UAVs, so multi-UAV cooperative teams are becoming a trend. In that case, as di erent autopilots, heterogeneous platforms, and application-dependent software components have to be integrated, multi-UAV system architectures that are fexible and can adapt to the team's needs are required. In this thesis, we develop system architectures for cooperative teams of UAVs, paying special attention to applications that require physical interaction with the environment, which is typically unstructured. First, we implement some layers to abstract the high-level components from the hardware speci cs. Then we propose increasingly advanced architectures, from a single-UAV hierarchical navigation architecture to an architecture for a cooperative team of heterogeneous UAVs. All this work has been thoroughly tested in both simulation and eld experiments in di erent challenging scenarios through research projects and robotics competitions. Most of the applications required physical interaction with the environment, mainly in unstructured outdoors scenarios. All the know-how and lessons learned throughout the process are shared in this thesis, and all relevant code is publicly available.Los vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAVs, del inglés Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) se han convertido en herramientas muy valiosas para un amplio espectro de aplicaciones, como inspección y mantenimiento, u operaciones de rescate, entre otras. Las capacidades de un único UAV pueden verse extendidas o complementadas al utilizar varios de estos vehículos simultáneamente, por lo que la tendencia actual es el uso de equipos cooperativos con múltiples UAVs. Para ello, es fundamental la integración de diferentes autopilotos, plataformas heterogéneas, y componentes software -que dependen de la aplicación-, por lo que se requieren arquitecturas multi-UAV que sean flexibles y adaptables a las necesidades del equipo. En esta tesis, se desarrollan arquitecturas para equipos cooperativos de UAVs, prestando una especial atención a aplicaciones que requieran de interacción física con el entorno, cuya naturaleza es típicamente no estructurada. Primero se proponen capas para abstraer a los componentes de alto nivel de las particularidades del hardware. Luego se desarrollan arquitecturas cada vez más avanzadas, desde una arquitectura de navegación para un único UAV, hasta una para un equipo cooperativo de UAVs heterogéneos. Todo el trabajo ha sido minuciosamente probado, tanto en simulación como en experimentos reales, en diferentes y complejos escenarios motivados por proyectos de investigación y competiciones de robótica. En la mayoría de las aplicaciones se requería de interacción física con el entorno, que es normalmente un escenario en exteriores no estructurado. A lo largo de la tesis, se comparten todo el conocimiento adquirido y las lecciones aprendidas en el proceso, y el código relevante está publicado como open-source