Manned, unmanned aircraft can work together to fight fires
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
For more than two days in early August the skies above the Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth were filled with the buzz of activity as drone and helicopter flights were conducted in synch with one another to demonstrate a technology that could one day coordinate the use of manned and unmanned aircraft to combat wildland fires.
The event, dubbed Operation Fire Swarm 2, was held at the Hillwood Flight Test Center (FTC) at Perot Field at Fort Worth Alliance Airport near the speedway. It featured the combined efforts of a group of UAV and software companies and educational and government agencies. The autonomously operated aircraft engaged in a series of complex coordinated maneuvers to battle simulated wildfires using the BlueSkies Operational Air Mobility system, which was designed to coordinate the operations of manned and unmanned aircraft in metropolitan airspace or wildfire conditions.
Keven Gambold, CEO and co-founder of Unmanned Experts, said Operation Fire Swarm 2 demonstrated “the first ever fully autonomous end-to-end utilization of both” the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) and NASA’s Provider of Services for Urban Air Mobility (PSU) system. Unmanned Experts served as Fire Swarm 2’s program manager.
The demonstration also helped prove out the concept of the “second shift” in wildfire management, in which unmanned aircraft could be deployed to fight fires at night, when flying manned firefighting aircraft became too dangerous.
“This concept of second shift is that the night portion belongs to the drone,” he said. Under this scenario manned aircraft– planes and helicopters – would battle blazing wildfires during the day. Then at nightfall, “We give all of these aerial firefighting capabilities over to unmanned or autonomous assets, and let them fight the fire for the next eight hours until the sun comes up,” he said.
According to a press release, Operation Fire Swarm 2 was the first ever fully autonomous, multi-aircraft, multi-operator, live flight operation demonstrating vehicle-to-vehicle communications in flight. In the demonstration scenario, upon the detection of a fire near the FTC, a team is deployed to the area and establishes an Incident Command Center (ICC), from which the incident commander plans and deploys the response to the disaster.
Because of the danger of touching off a real wildfire in the area, the team instead created wildfire simulations, Gambold said. “We weren’t burning anything for real. It’s August in Texas. We were just faking the fire,” he said.
The team uploaded data giving the general fire location into the system and a group of autonomous search drones was launched to search the “fire traffic area.” In the meantime, a ground scheduler programed routes to the water sources that would be used to extinguish the fire, a number of ponds northeast of the fire traffic area. While a real-world scenario would call for a swarm of water-bomber drones to douse the flames, for purposes of the Fire Swarm demonstration that part was played by a manned aircraft from the Helicopter Institute, fitted with BlueSkies software.
Gambold said the team had planned to use two helicopters but one of the choppers became unserviceable, so they had to use one helicopter along with a simulated version.
“The whole thing’s virtually constructed, so it works the same way,” he said. The system allowed the manned and unmanned aerial vehicles to deconflict with one another on their way up to the water sources and then continue to safely share the airspace with each other on the return trip to the fire traffic area.
“When they get into the fire traffic area, they’re given all of these routes autonomously. They then talk on a vehicle-communications link with the ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) asset, which updates them with the target location, clears out the way, and then they go in and simulate dropping the water on the fire location,” Gambold said.
After completing one assigned fire-fighting flight, the aircraft returned to the staging point to refuel, before taking off on the next mission. The aircraft flew about five missions over the two-and-a-half-day demonstration.
Throughout the exercise, the aircraft communicated directly with one another, with the vehicles designated as water bombers talking to the search drones to receive updated locations of the fire hot spots. This information in turn was used to determine where to conduct the simulated dropping of fire retardants.
In addition to scheduling and monitoring all of flights and facilitating vehicle-to-vehicle communications, the system guided the tactical operations, managing potential airspace conflicts and managing contingencies such as changes in the weather. All this is based on the data that’s fed into the system at the outset. “You can drop in any sort of what are called capacity constraints or any issues, weather — it gets live weather feeds – or any closures of the airspace.”
The team conducting the Fire Swarm event is known as the North Texas Cohort. The team comprises Hillwood and its affiliate Alliance Aviation Services, which owns and operates the AllianceTexas Flight Test Center; the Helicopter Institute as the air platform, crew, and training partner; Avianco as one of the PSU providers; Metron as the demand-capability balancing software developer; Hermes as the primary data-hub; AAMTEX as the UTM and weather service provider; the University of North Texas as the program lead, and Unmanned Experts as the program manager and BlueSkies development and marketing team.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
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