Safe Coordination of Human-Robot Firefighting Teams [article]

Esmaeil Seraj and Andrew Silva and Matthew Gombolay
2019 arXiv   pre-print
Wildfires are destructive and inflict massive, irreversible harm to victims' lives and natural resources. Researchers have proposed commissioning unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to provide firefighters with real-time tracking information; yet, these UAVs are not able to reason about a fire's track, including current location, measurement, and uncertainty, as well as propagation. We propose a model-predictive, probabilistically safe distributed control algorithm for human-robot collaboration in
more » ... ildfire fighting. The proposed algorithm overcomes the limitations of prior work by explicitly estimating the latent fire propagation dynamics to enable intelligent, time-extended coordination of the UAVs in support of on-the-ground human firefighters. We derive a novel, analytical bound that enables UAVs to distribute their resources and provides a probabilistic guarantee of the humans' safety while preserving the UAVs' ability to cover an entire fire.
arXiv:1903.06847v1 fatcat:ln7cyf2ugrcatmxrssw6itlbeu