Real-time overview images help improve fire-fighting

The National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) is working on small, unmanned aerial observation systems and the method for integrating them with fire departments nationwide. The goal: to more effectively fight major fires.

The probability of forest fires increases during the hot, dry summer months. When fire fighters arrive at the scene of a major forest fire, they need to obtain situational awareness information as quickly as possible: what is the exact location of the fire, how has the fire developed, and where are fellow fire-fighters located? At present, this information is either lacking or fire department commanders receive this information relatively late. 

To solve this problem, NLR and its partners initiated the Fire-Fly project, in which fire department commanders are presented with real-time overview imagery of the area where there is a forest fire. This information can then be disseminated to crisis centres, the police, and other fire departments and fire-fighters in the field. 

Those participating in the Fire-Fly project are researching and demonstrating how and under what conditions small unmanned aerial observation systems can be integrated with the various fire departments’ information systems. In this project, NLR is responsible for the technical implementation of the observation system, which includes the system design, data storage, and also supplementary products (such as photographs of the images, mosaics, etc).

Delft Dynamics, a company participating in this project, has in the meantime successfully completed a flight test with an unmanned helicopter; this UAS relayed the first images, including meta data, to the fire department’s information system. The initial results were promising. The expectation now is that Fire-Fly will be fully operational and capable of helping to fight fires by the summer of 2011.

In this project, NLR is collaborating with fire departments from regions of the country, such as North and East Gelderland, were there is a high-risk of forest fires, and with partners from industry: Nieuwland Automatisering, Geodan Systems & Research, and Delft Dynamics. The project falls under the auspices of the Social Innovation Agenda (MIA) Safety, which in turn is part of the governmental programme Netherlands Entrepreneurial Innovation Country (NOI).

Fire-Fly corresponds to the focus on integrated imaging in the Social Innovation Agenda Safety ‘Operating in Chains and Networks’: Use of real-time information deriving from sensors onboard unmanned systems, in the service of situational awareness. The Fire-Fly project adheres to four of the seven key Dutch clusters, as identified in the ‘Security First’ document issued by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations (BZK).

As part of the governmental Innovation Scheme, the Dutch ministries of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, Justice, Economic Affairs, and Defense have jointly contributed €54 million euro to combine and set up a single social innovation programme for Safety.

NL Agency is implementing this scheme, which is of great importance to Dutch users and industry in the area of social safety for two primary reasons: first, because technology can be developed or appropriated for safety applications, and second, because the implementation contributes to the Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) of the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Source: Netherlands National Aerospace Laboratory