In this article, a system using Unmanned Autonomous Quadrotor Helicopters (UqHs) for forest fire surveillance is presented. Quadrotor helicopters (equipped with inertial navigation systems, GPS, RF-transceivers and cameras) fly over the expanding perimeter of the fire and are used as the fire-front sensing systems. These helicopter-units patrol in a continuous manner and agree on varying rendez-vous with each other. These rendez-vous are set as waypoints in order to divide the surveyed fire-front length at equidistant portions. After the rendez-vous-meetings between these helicopters, and the anticipated spread of the fire, new temporal-spatial rendez-vous points are predicted and transmitted to each UqH. These rendez-vous waypoints rely heavily on the fire-front spread algorithm (wind condition, moisture, fire fuel and the firefighters' reaction. For more accurate observation, these UqHs fly at low-altitude and are prune to sudden wind-gusts. These wind-gusts can be detrimental not only to the flight performance of these units but also to their overall stability. In each helicopter, a back step propagation unit along with a stabilizing controller relying on the Constrained Finite Time Optimization Control (CFTOC) scheme is used. The CFTOC is responsible for attenuating the effects of the random wind-gust disturbances on tracking of the a priori reference trajectory. Simulation results are used to investigate the efficiency of the suggested concept.
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Alexis, K., Nikolakopoulos, G., Tzes, A., Dritsas, L. (2009). Coordination of Helicopter UAVs for Aerial Forest-Fire Surveillance. In: Valavanis, K.P. (eds) Applications of Intelligent Control to Engineering Systems. Intelligent Systems, Control, and Automation: Science and Engineering, vol 39. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3018-4_7
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