Development of a Firefighting Drone for Constructing Fire-breaks to Suppress Nascent Low-Intensity Fires

Korean forests are highly vulnerable to forest fires, which can severely damage property and human life. This necessitates the establishment of a rapid response system and the construction of firebreaks to prevent the spread of fires and protect key facilities. The existing firebreak construction methods can be classified into prevention- and response-stage methods. In the prevention stage, the progression and spread of fire are delayed, while in the response stage, primitive manual methods involving tools such as hooks are used, in addition to aerial deployment of water and fire retardants through helicopters. Herein, we propose the use of “fire-extinguishing drones” for firebreak construction during the initial, low-intensity stage of a fire before the deployment of firefighting personnel. We implement a continuous fire-extinguishing module capable of carrying six fire-extinguishing balls to verify its deployment accuracy and stable hovering capabilities. Through the operation of multiple drones using a ground control system and real-time kinematics to precisely generate designated automatic flight paths, we conducted experiments to assess the feasibility of firebreak construction by using fire-extinguishing drones to prevent the spread of wildfires. A firebreak construction field test was conducted to evaluate the accuracy of continuous fire extinguisher deployment, hovering performance during deployment, accuracy of the RTK-designated paths, and GCS performance. The proposed system achieved 100% performance on all indicators, except the accuracy of the RTK-designated paths.