Architecture for a helicopter-based unmanned aerial systems wildfire surveillance system

Abstract

Forest fires are an important problem for many countries. The economical loss is the most visible impact in the short term. The ecological damage and the impact on the wild life diversity and climate change are the most important factors in the long term. Up to now, satellites like NASA's MODIS (moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer) system have been the primary source for strategic large area thermal imaging. Tactical monitoring has been until recently reduced to observation from the ground or from some dedicated aerial resource like command and control helicopters. However, little technological support has been available to those in charge of these monitoring tasks. An unmanned aerial systems (UAS) platform capable of overflying the area of a forest fire and with capacity of operating from non-prepared terrains would be an extremely valuable information gathering asset in several well-defined circumstances: surveillance during day and specially night, and early morning or late afternoon monitoring of post-fire hot-spots during the following days of the extinction. This work introduces the Sky-Eye system, a helicopter-based UAS platform that together with its hardware/software architecture is designed to facilitate the development of wildfire remote sensing applications. The Sky-Eye UAS will improve the overall awareness by providing tactical support to wildfire monitoring and control of ground squads. Sky-Eye employs existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technology that can be immediately deployed on the field on-board medium-sized UAS helicopters at a reasonable cost. Sky-Eye is built on top of a user-parameterizable architecture called USAL (UAS Service Abstraction Layer). This architecture defines a collection of standard services and their interrelations as a basic starting point for further development. Functionalities like enhanced flight-plans, a mission control engine, data storage, communications management, etc. are offered.

Keywords:

• wildfire monitoring
• unmanned aerial vehicles

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by Ministry of Science and Education of Spain under contract CICYT TIN 2007-63927.