Project description
Heavy-duty drone helps fight fires
The technological growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)s, or drones as they are popularly known, is being used to save lives and the environment. The EU-funded WILDHOPPER project is developing a heavy-duty multirotor drone for forest firefighting. The WILD HOPPER’s 600-litre platform means it has enough lifting power to do more than fire monitoring. It can be used as an alternative to traditional firefighting solutions and to cover night operations. It is cost affordable and ideal for small and medium regional structures. Another advantage is precision of the release, derived from multirotor platform dynamic capabilities. What is more, a proprietary water jet nebulisation system can yield a higher efficiency compared to traditional aerial firefighting means like helicopters and hydroplanes.
Objective
DRONE HOPPER is a company devoted to designing and manufacturing heavy-duty multirotor drones. For that, it has
developed a number of proprietary technologies aimed at, essentially, providing a safe and reliable heavy-lifting platform.
Special care has been taken on liquid transportation and release.
WILD HOPPER is a 600-litre platform designed for forest fire firefighting. This payload capacity overcomes typical limitations
of electrically powered drones that cannot be used for anything more than fire monitoring, as they do not have sufficient
lifting power. It uses all the technologies developed by DRONE HOPPER, yielding a novel tool to counter rush fires
worldwide.
The enhanced capabilities of the WILD HOPPER allows to complement existing aerial means and overcome their main
limitations, especially the need to cover night operations. This allows reducing heavily the duration of the wild fires by
allowing continuous aerial support to the extinguishing activities once the conventional aerial means (hydroplanes and
helicopters) are set back to the base at night.
Other advantages of the WILD HOPPER are the precision of the release, derived from multirotor platform dynamic
capabilities. This, together with the proprietary water jet nebulization system, yields a very high efficiency compared to
traditional means that carry similar (helicopters) or more liters (hydroplanes) that just drop the water at a certain speed a
highest altitudes over the target fire, limited by their dynamic operational envelope.
Being an autonomous vehicle, WILD HOPPER does not put at risk human lives as platform management is done on a safe
ground base.
The WILD HOPPER is a less expensive platform than conventional aerial means, allowing small and medium regional
bodies to own their own fast-response resources. Being less complex machines, cost of ownership is heavily reduced.
Finally, WILD HOPPER allows swarm operation to implement several units in coordination to boost effiency.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringautomotive engineeringautonomous vehicles
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringroboticsautonomous robotsdrones
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringaircraftrotorcraft
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
28015 Madrid
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.