Accessing the Progress of the Association of Unmanned Systems International Firefighting Table Top Exercises

摘要

Federal and State fire fighting agencies are in need of new technology to aid inwildland fire fighting efforts. As agency budgets decline implementation of newtechnology will only be realized if the new technology is able to benefit thefirefighter in a way that will result in cost saving in the overall budget.Unmanned Aerial Systems and Unmanned Ground Vehicles have that potential.Unmanned systems have proven themselves in military applications there havebeen only limited deployments of unmanned system in wildland fire fighting.While most of these deployments have successfully shown that unmannedsystems can aid firefighting efforts they have also exposed the need for metricsfor evaluating their benefits to the firefighter. These metrics will allow for thebusiness case to be made for fire fighting agencies to make room in theirbudgets for unmanned systems. In addition, unmanned system manufactures andproviders need to have confidence that there is a market for cost-effective,innovative unmanned systems tailored to wildland fire fighting. TheAssociation of Unmanned Systems International had hosted two FirefightingTable Top Exercises FF-TTX, Monetery CA, 2009 and Dugway UT, 2010 inpartnership with the US Forest Service and the Naval Postgraduate School toprovide a platform for unmanned system community to interact with wildlandfirefighters. The lessons learned from these two exercises should pave the wayfor unmanned systems to improve the speed, focus, and agility of the wildlandfire fighters worldwide.