Cooperative forest fire surveillance
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) controlled by a single system can be used in rescue and intervention missions where ground vehicles have inherent limitations in accessing the desired location. In particular, unmanned helicopters have proven to be valuable in those cases where aerial vehicles offer the only way to approach the objective and perform tasks due to their manoeuverability. Helicopters are well suited to agile target tracking as well as inspection and monitoring tasks that require them to remain in the same position and obtain detailed views. The COMETS system has been designed to allow the cooperation of multiple helicopters for forest fire detection and monitoring. Several UAVs can provide simultaneous views of the event being monitored, thus improving the perception of the event and allowing each aircraft to benefit from data gathered by others. In such a multi-UAVs system, autonomous deliberative activities require the consideration of temporal constraints, high uncertainties on tasks execution and stringent reactivity to contingencies. Moreover, ground operators might want to take control over UAVs when necessary. COMETS hence required an architecture integrating a distributed communication system that covered wired and wireless links. Small aerial vehicles impose severe limits on power consumption and size of the on-board computers, making it necessary to process most of the aerial images and data collected off-board. Therefore, besides establishing interconnections within the UAVs' fleet, there must be peer-to-peer connections with the ground stations. For further information about the multiple UAV system COMETS please visit http://www.comets-uavs.org/
