This paper proposes the Education Design Experiment (EDE) as an instructional framework for robotics education and demonstrates how it is implemented in the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest (TCFFHRC) projects. The overarching goal of the EDE is to examine how best to implement, evaluate, and conceptualize the robotics education process while designing, building and operating rob...

Multiple noise measurements were taken on 6 types of fire station equipment and 15 types of emergency response vehicle-related equipment used by firefighters during routine and emergency operations at 10 fire stations. Five of the six types of fire station equipment, when measured at a distance of one meter and ear level, emitted noise equal to or greater than 85 dBA, including lawn maintenance...

Forest fires and burnt area in Portugal have been increasing in the last decades, contrarily to other southern European countries, although more resources are being allocated to prevention, detection and fire fighting. To minimize the probability of wildfires occurrence, it is crucial to assure the effectiveness of the prevention, vigilance and first attack operations. When fire prevention fail...

The wireless sensor network is used to simulate poisonous gas generating system in the Fire-Fighting Simulated Training System. In the paper, we use the wireless signal to simulate the poisonous gas source and use received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to simulate the distance between the fireman and the gas source. The gas detection instrument samples the temperature and sphygmus of the tra...

This paper presents a notification system to identify in near-real-time Tweets describing fire events in Australia. The system identifies fire related ‘alert words’ published on Twitter which are further processed by a classifier to determine if they correspond to an actual fire event. We describe how the classifier has been established and report preliminary results. The original notification ...

Bushfire represents a significant risk within the Australian environment, and providing a spatial estimate of the risk represents a challenge for producing planning guidelines. The primary method for estimating day-to-day fire weather risk within Australian fire fighting operational environments has been the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index, which is an empirical index taking into account both...

Destructive fires in Amazonia have occurred in the past decade, leading to forest degradation, carbon emissions, impaired air quality, and property damage. Here, we couple climate, geospatial, and province-level census data, with farmer surveys to examine the climatic, demographic, and land use factors associated with fire frequency in the Peruvian Amazon from 2000 to 2010. Although our results...

The paper presents an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), consisting of several aerial vehicles and a central station, for forest fire monitoring. Fire monitoring is defined as the computation in real-time of the evolution of the fire front shape and potentially other parameters related to the fire propagation, and is very important for forest fire fighting. The paper shows how an UAS can automatic...

Wild-land fire fighting is a hazardous job. A key task for firefighters is to observe the “fire front” to chart the progress of the fire and areas that will likely spread next. Lack of information of the fire front causes many accidents. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to cover wildfire is promising because it can replace humans in hazardous fire tracking and significantly reduce operatio...