The idea of a pair of drones communicating with each other, independently searching for a forest fire and circling a blaze may sound like a scene from a science fiction movie.
It's not, though.
AI-based technology for detecting and preventing forest fires is already being tested by the FireMan project, headed by the National Land Survey of Finland's Finnish Geospatial Institute (FGI).
Developers for the project, which also involves input from the Finnish Research Centre for Technology VTT and the Universities of Oulu and Jyväskylä, showed off some of what their drones can do this week. Sent aloft from the grounds of the Emergency Services Academy in Kuopio, the autonomous drones quickly found a fire set for the exercise, positioned themselves in a circle around it and transmitted an image back to base.
"We have developed fully autonomous drones that can swarm in the forest independently. They have the potential to replace [human-piloted] fire watch flights," explains Eija Honkavaara, the FGI research professor leading the project.
Still outside the law
The drones are equipped with a variety of cameras that detect fire and send a picture of the situation to the emergency services. They can also transmit the image to a cloud server, where it is converted to a map in real time.
"The law does not yet allow the use of fully autonomous drones, but the means to deploy them already exist," Honkavaara points out .
The project has also solved the problem of how drones can operate in areas where there is no data transmission network.
A drone hovering at the end of a cable is used as a temporary base station to relay signals. The drone can soar up to a height of 100 metres and has its own satellite link. The cable also carries power from a ground station.
"It can stay in the air 365 days a year, 24 hours a day," says Honkavaara.
In addition to observation and monitoring, developers have trained the artificial intelligence used to predict the spread of forest fires.
The project has made use of controlled burns by the state land management company Metsähallitus for forest restoration and collecting data for training drones. During operations, the collected data is processed by onboard computers, and key data is sent to the command centre, which makes forecasts on the progress of the fire, allowing firefighters to choose the best way to put out the blaze.
"Extinguishing forest fires as quickly as possible is of great economic and social importance," stresses Professor Honkavaara.
The FireMan project is funded as part of the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility.
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