Extinguishing of Ground Fires by Fully Autonomous UAVs motivated by the MBZIRC 2020 Competition

In this paper, a system for autonomous extinguishing of ground fires using the placement of fire blankets by Multi-rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is proposed. The proposed system, relying on the fusion of multiple onboard sensors using only onboard computers, is infrastructure independent with a focus on high reliability in safety-critical missions that require power-on-and-go full autonomy. This task was part of the third challenge of MBZIRC 2020 aimed at the development of autonomous robotic systems for extinguishing fires inside and outside of buildings. The MBZIRC competition promotes the development of such robotics applications that are highly demanded by society and, due to their complexity and required robot abilities, go beyond the current robotic state of the art. As far as we are aware, our team was one of only two teams to achieve successful system for placement of fire blankets fully autonomously with vision-based target localization without using Real-time kinematic (RTK)-global navigation satellite system (GNSS), as was required in the competition and also for the real missions of first responders.