Aerial Assistance System for Automated Firefighting during Turntable Ladder Operations

2025-11-18

AI Summary

Industrial facility fires pose significant challenges—including large building footprints, restricted visibility, and imprecise fire-source localization—leading to low suppression efficiency, delayed response, and elevated operational risks. To address these issues, this paper proposes an aerial-assisted automated firefighting system integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with ground-based firefighting turntable ladders. The UAVs carry thermal imaging sensors for multi-source fire detection and sub-meter-level localization; geographic information is fused to generate collision-free flight corridors; and a novel UAV–fire-cannon dynamic triangulation mechanism enables operator-selected target points, autonomous path planning, and closed-loop control of cannon orientation. Experimental results demonstrate sub-meter fire-source localization accuracy and precise jet guidance, reducing firefighting response time by 37%, while significantly enhancing operational safety and cross-platform coordination efficiency.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

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.

Problem

• Addresses visual obstructions impairing firefighting accuracy in industrial facilities
• Solves inaccurate fire location assessments that increase damage and operation time
• Automates fire detection and water jet targeting using UAV and turntable ladder

Innovation

• UAV autonomously detects heat sources
• System triangulates fire location using dual poses
• Automated fire monitor directs water jet accurately