FireFly

FireFly is a fire fighting hexacopter that uses a raspberry pi and a flight control board to look for heat signatures corresponding to fire. It then flies towards it and dispenses fire retardant from an off the shelf fire extinguisher. Its payload bay can be used to house several types of fire extinguishers, allowing it to extinguish various types of fires such as type A,B,C,D. Moreover, FireFly has a First Person View (FPV) camera to help the operator control the aircraft accurately even when its not in the line of sight.

I first got the idea for FireFly when I read a news article about the damage California wild fires cause and the difficulties the firemen face while trying to get them under control. Moreover FireFly can be of great help while fighting fires in high rise building where it would be impractical to use a ladder and too time consuming and dangerous to use stairs.

The idea is simple, use a drone with a heat sensor and an extinguisher to put out the fire. But the execution is not so simple. One of the biggest challenges was integrating Ardupilot (flight control software), running on the flight controller, with Raspberry Pi for full autonomous flight.