Smart Firefighting Robot with Thermal Imaging and IoT-Based Human Detection for Enhanced Rescue Operations

Fire is an event that can cause a lot of loss of life
and property in residential, industrial and commercial
buildings. Abstract It is important to quickly suppress fires and
identify trapped persons to limit loss of life and property. In this
paper, the design and development of an autonomous robot with
Internet of Things (IoT) technology that can detect the presence
of humans in a fire zone and feed the real time alarm
information to a monitoring server is presented. The proposed
system consists of a master controller – Raspberry Pi and a slave
controller – Arduino, which synchronize the sensing, navigation,
communication, and the firefighting processes. Environmental
awareness and obstacle detection is achieved with the use of gas,
ultrasonic, microphone and camera modules, and the thermal
sensor is used to detect the presence of human. The robot has a
Dry Chemical Powder (DCP) fire suppression capability to
effectively put out fires. Through LoRa SX1278 communication
technology, the long-distance transmission at low power allows
for continuous monitoring of critical data even in difficult
conditions, to a local server. Experimental results prove the
capability of the system to accurately detect human presence,
real sense temperature change and prompt emergency
notification to control center. The proposed solution will provide
a cost-effective, reliable and intelligent solution to firefighting
and rescue missions, minimize human firefighters’ exposure to
dangerous environments and enhance the efficiency of
emergency response.