Uas Architecture for Forest Fire Remote Sensing

The use of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in remote sensing works is becoming a reality. In forest fire scenarios we propose the use of UAS for semi-real-time hot spot detection. In this paper we present Sky-Eye, a rotorcraft prototype designed to provide significant advantages in terms of flexibility, precision, cost, and safety. Sky-Eye is specifically designed for Mediterranean forest fires, as a support tool for the Fire Services to improve tactical decisions. More than 50,000 fires are detected in South Europe each year which burnt hundreds of thousands of hectares every year. Figure 1 shows the last decade most critical fires location and year in South Europe (Castellnou, 2009. For example, more than 270,000 hectares of vegetation burned and more than 110 villages were affected directly by the fire front only in Greece during the catastrophic fire season of 2007 (Xanthopoulos, 2008). This paper proposes the use of an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) as a valid alternative for semi-real-time wild fire surveillance. UAS have the flexibility of an aircraft for working as fast remote sensing tool. The cost of operating UAS, once the legal aspects are defined, will be on a tenth of operating and aircraft. And more important, the absence of a pilot on board is absolutely safer mean than traditional aircraft for obtaining real time remote sensing data in dangerous scenarios like a wild fire.