Safe Coordination of Human-Robot Firefighting Teams

Understand

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 wildfire 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.