Novel fire detection device for robotic fire fighting

This paper presents a novel fire detection device in the highly complicated urban environment, such as an office building, supermarket, school, etc. A robot for fire detecting and/or search and rescue needs to move fast while searching wide area. For this, we had developed an thermal image camera module which is capable of selectively acquiring very large field of view (FOV) - panoramic view - images or narrow field of view images from a single viewpoint, at video rates. An image processing and device controlling algorithm to detect a fire fastly and accurately was developed also. The developed device was tested in the indoor environments and the feasibility of the device was evaluated. We expect that the application of the proposed device is not limited to fire fighting. Its application will include a military, security and scientific field. For the further works, we will improve the performance of the detection algorithm in the proposed device and test it using a mobile platform in a realistic environment.