Fire safety is connected to thousands of households at one end and socio-economic development at the other. It is related to the safety of people’s lives and property, as well as the overall situation of national economy and people’s livelihood. The responsibility is heavier than Mount Tai. With the development of modern cities, fire safety risks continue to rise, and the contradiction between the traditional fire protection mode and the fire protection needs under the new situation has become increasingly prominent. In recent years, with the injection of “intelligent factors” such as “Internet of Things”, “cloud computing” and “big data”, the fire protection industry has blossomed with new vitality, and “smart fire protection” has emerged as the times require, the construction of intelligent and three-dimensional social fire prevention and control system with full coverage has been accelerated.
At the same time, China is not only a country with large forest resources, but also a country with frequent forest fires. Therefore, how to apply high-tech methods to forest resource monitoring, early detection, early prediction, and early extinguishment of fire conditions, turning major disasters into small disasters, and turning disasters into non-disasters, has become a major issue in forest fire prevention work.
Currently, in terms of firefighting and rescue, UAVs are mainly used in fire detection, rescue process recording and fire field monitoring. Although the rescue efficiency is improved to a certain extent, the casualties are reduced, how to further expand its application in firefighting and rescue and disaster relief is an important research direction for a long time in the future. With the gradual development of new technologies such as hardware material manufacturing, software technology, integrated energy, etc., UAV has been widely used in agriculture, public security, transportation and other fields, which has also boosted its rapid development.
As of March 2020, China has 220 million hectares of forest, with a forest coverage rate of 22.96%. As a new type of industrial technology, UAV firefighting has been widely used in various fields. In China, many firefighting agencies have used UAVs to successfully conduct fire field detection and monitoring, throw rescue materials and other attempts, and the effect is very obvious. For now, UAVs can assist in decision-making, issuing emergency orders and performing rescue missions, serve as communication relays and search for water source roads in emergency firefighting. In 2020, during the 122h rescue process of the “3·7 collapse of Xinjia Hotel” in Quanzhou, Fujian, Longyan Detachment, which took part in the rescue time of 92 hours, used the equipped UAVs to provide a full range of audio and video support for the emergency management department, the fire rescue bureau, the Fujian Provincial Corps and other combat command centers for up to 25 hours, assisting superior decision-making and online rescue on-site guidance, and has made a great contribution. With the evolution and development of UAV technology, it will play an irreplaceable role in fire rescue in the future.
The HC-131 UAV has the characteristics of autonomous take-off and landing function, long measurement and control distance, and fast speed. The whole aircraft uses carbon fiber composite material with light weight and strong structure. It is equipped with dual photoelectric pods to carry out large-scale forest patrol. The HC-521 vertical take-off and landing fixed-wing UAV has a fully autonomous vertical take-off and landing function, which reduces the requirements for take-off and landing sites. At the same time, more rotary-wing UAVs have long endurance and large operating radius, which can be used in complex forest operations.
The HC-332 hexrcopter UAV is equipped with a visible light photoelectric pod, which can quickly reach the fire point. Real-time monitoring of the fire situation in the fire site can assist the follow-up mission to prevent the fire from spreading.
HC-342 is a pulse checking and sprinkling integrated UAV of Honeycomb, which responds to the world’s three major firefighting problems of high-rise building fires, forest fires, and petrochemical fires. The platform can be equipped with a set of three-tube fire-fighting bomb launching device, and integrated high-definition video acquisition target ranging function, which can realize fully autonomous flight. The fuselage adopts the design concept of drag reduction, and uses high-performance lithium batteries as the energy supply device to effectively increase the flight speed and flight duration. The arm adopts a folding design, which is convenient for transportation and occupies a small space. The whole aircraft adopts carbon fiber composite material, which is safe and reliable.