Abstract
In recent years, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles has spread across different fields of the industry due to their ease of deployment and minimal operational risk. Firefighting is a dangerous task for the humans involved, in which the use of UAVs presents itself as a good first-action protocol for a rapid response to an incipient fire because of their safety and speed of action. Current research is mainly focused on wildland fires, but fires in urban environments are barely mentioned in the bibliography. To motivate the research on this topic, ICUAS’22 organized an international competition inspired by this mission, with the challenge of a UAV traversing an area populated by obstacles, finding a target, and precisely throwing a ball to it. For this competition, the Computer Vision and Aerial Robotics (CVAR-UPM) team developed a solution composed of multiple modules and structured by a mission planner. In this paper, we describe our approach and the developed architecture that led us to be awarded the first prize in the competition.
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The code of the solution described in this document can be found here: https://github.com/CVAR-ICUAS-22/cvar_icuas2022_project
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Funding
This work has been supported by the project “COPILOT: Control, Supervisión y Operación Optimizada de Plantas Fotovoltaicas mediante Integración Sinérgica de Drones, IoT y Tecnologías Avanzadas de Comunicaciones” Ref: Y2020/EMT6368 funded by Madrid Government under the R &D Sinergic Projects Program, partially funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation under the program “Projects for Knowledge Generating” ref: PID2021-127648OB-C32, and the Grant FPU20/07198 of the Spanish Ministry for Universities given to the fourth author. Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.
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David Perez-Saura and Miguel Fernandez-Cortizas developed the design and implementation of the solution, and they also carried out the experiments. David Perez-Saura wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors commented on earlier versions. Rafael Perez-Segui and Pedro Arias-Perez collaborated in the development of the solution and drafting of the manuscript. Pascual Campoy performed the supervision tasks. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Perez-Saura, D., Fernandez-Cortizas, M., Perez-Segui, R. et al. Urban Firefighting Drones: Precise Throwing from UAV. J Intell Robot Syst 108, 66 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-023-01883-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-023-01883-6