FireBot - An Autonomous Surveillance Robot for Fire Prevention, Early Detection and Extinguishing

Every year, fire is responsible for numerous deaths, as well as huge material losses. Therefore, prevention and early detection of fire have become a priority for society, as well as the main research and development issue for many scientists and various industries. This paper describes our work in the development of FireBot, an autonomous surveillance robot. The Firebot is equipped with modern technologies and state-of-the-art navigational and computer vision methods that enable autonomous navigation, obstacle avoidance, video surveillance, fire prevention and detection, and fire extinguishing. It utilizes both infrared thermal (IRT) and RGB cameras paired with a modern convolutional neural network (CNN) for fault and fire detection, as well as various other sensors for analyzing air composition, processing of surrounding sounds, and detecting irregularities in its environment in general. The best performing CNN was implemented and tested in real-world environments for fire detection purposes, the results of which are presented in this paper. A state-of-the-art SLAM algorithm paired with LiDAR and a depth camera is used for mapping and navigation. The architecture presented in this paper, along with all functionalities planned for future work, represents an innovative autonomous surveillance system that will make a great contribution in the field of fire prevention and detection.