Comprehensive Drone System for Deployment in Disaster Scenarios with Focus on Forest Fire Fighting

As the effects of climate change become more significant, forests all over the world are drying out. Among other problems, this results in a drastic increase of wild fire occurrences. In order to effectively fight forest fires, emergency forces are in need of safe, cost efficient and widely applicable ways to extinguish large scale fires. In this paper the authors propose a comprehensive system to extinguish fires utilizing large (3 m rotor diameter) coaxial helicopter drones. The system is designed to have very low personnel requirements and therefore greatly decreased operational costs as compared to helicopters. It includes a fleet of up to forty drones and a ground station to exchange the drone's batteries and refill the water tanks. As the drones do not rely on vision conditions the system can be operated continuously without an interruption at night.