With help from mentors from Sikorsky, three University of Connecticut (UConn) engineering seniors are working to build and program an autonomous firefighting UAS to battle fires without a pilot’s guidance.

Once the UAS is complete, it will be equipped with a thermal imaging camera to identify a fire, object avoidance technology to steer clear of any obstacles, and a softball-sized fire-extinguishing ball that will be dropped over the flames.

The students will develop coding language that will tie the drone’s technology together, and it will operate based on inputted coordinates.

“In the world today there’s a high prevalence of forest fires, like in California, but the problem is of how to safely put out these fires,” explains Joshua Steil, an electrical engineering major working on the project.

“So our project, in essence, is to see if we can start putting out fires without a human driver.”

The UAS that the UConn-Sikorsky team is developing can only put out a campfire-size fire, but the goal of the project is to prove that this technology is possible, to pave the way for bigger technology to be engineered in the future, according to computer engineering major Ryan Heilemann.

“The idea is that in the future, on a larger scale, there can be a fleet of unmanned helicopters that can go out and put out forest fires, thereby lowering loss of life,” Steil says.

Over the years, teams have worked on similar projects with Sikorsky, and these experiences have offered insight into what has worked and what hasn’t.

The team looked back on previous projects’ reports, including last year’s team, which was the first to integrate firefighting capabilities into the UAS. The previous team that worked on this project used small thermal sensors called thermopile array sensors, but Heilemann points out that these sensors required the previous UAS to be only about six feet from the flames, which was too close for real-world applications.

With this in mind, the UConn team decided to use an infrared camera, which allows for more distance from the flames.