| Authors | Roldán-Gómez et al. |
| Country | Universidad AutóModelma de Madrid, Spain |
| Paper (PDF) | View paper |
| Category | Protection & compliance › Wildfire |
Mainly from the firefighting perspective, but vegetation and risk mapping might be useful for forestry; Concept only! Model product
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The concept of deploying coordinated swarms of quadcopter UAVs to support firefighting operations represents an emerging area of research and applied technology development at the intersection of autonomous systems, fire management, and emergency response. Unlike single large UAVs, a swarm of smaller quadcopters can distribute sensing and intervention tasks across a wider area, maintain coverage redundancy if individual units fail, and collectively carry payloads — such as fire retardant, water, or sensor packages — that no single small platform could manage alone. Swarm coordination relies on multi-agent algorithms that enable individual quadcopters to communicate, share situational awareness, and allocate roles dynamically in response to evolving fire behaviour, without requiring centralised command of every vehicle. In a firefighting support role, quadcopter swarms can perform continuous aerial surveillance of fire perimeters, delivering real-time thermal and RGB imagery to incident commanders to inform backburn timing, resource positioning, and evacuation decisions; this is particularly valuable when smoke grounds manned aircraft. Beyond surveillance, research groups and startups have explored swarms capable of deploying gel-based fire suppressants along the edges of prescribed burns or wildfires, acting as a first-response tool while ground crews and air tankers mobilise. In the Australian context — where catastrophic wildfire seasons such as the 2019–20 Black Summer event demonstrated the limits of existing aerial firefighting capacity — quadcopter swarm concepts are being actively explored by organisations including the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, CSIRO, and various university robotics groups. Regulatory challenges around beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations for swarms in Australian airspace, governed by CASA under the Civil Aviation Safety Regulations, remain a significant barrier, but ongoing regulatory reform and the development of remote identification and traffic management infrastructure are expected to progressively enable operational deployments in emergency scenarios.
Modelt aimed at productivity but effective for wildfire suppression, providing strong protective risk-reduction value.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | Roldán-Gómez et al. |
| Country | Universidad AutóModelma de Madrid, Spain |
| Type | Paper |
| Year | 2021 |
| Employees | 0 |
| FWPA RD&E | 2.1 |
| Remarks | 0.0 |
| Case Studies | 0 |