**5. Conclusions**

This paper analyzes the current state of firefighting missions and potential technologies that can be applied in the future. To this end, we have conducted two surveys of firefighters to know the main problems they face in their work and their point of view on possible technological solutions. According to the results, the most common problems are the lack of human and material resources for all the activities and the need for real-time information about the evolution of fires during extinguishing tasks. The proposed technologies are positively evaluated when they support their tasks and do not threaten their jobs. Specifically, firefighters support the use of drones as a tool to collect relevant information for prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing activities. In the cases of prevention and surveillance, they approve the generation of maps that help to organize the tasks for preparing vegetation and detect the areas with the highest risk of fires, respectively. In the case of extinguishing, they consider that drones can provide them with real-time information about fires to make their actions safer and more effective.

A review of the literature has been developed to find proposals of robotic systems applied to firefighting tasks. In the case of prevention, there are no proposals for robotizing the vegetation preparation tasks, but there are some developments in the context of forestry and agriculture applicable to them. Conversely, there are multiple proposals for robotizing surveillance tasks, including homogeneous and heterogeneous fleets of drones equipped with conventional, multispectral, and thermal cameras. Finally, in the case of extinguishing, there are multiple approaches to put out fires using autonomous drones, but less to use them to support the firefighters working on the ground.

This paper proposes a concept of operation to apply drone swarms to support fire prevention, surveillance, and extinguishing activities. It considers a fleet of homogeneous quadcopters that individually are only able to visit waypoints and use payloads, but collectively can perform tasks of search, surveillance, reconnaissance, mapping, monitoring, support, tracking, and transport. Three operator roles are defined: mission commander, who commands the swarm and coordinates the mission; team leaders, who coordinate a team on the ground; and team members, who perform the tasks in different areas. These operators have access to different levels of information on the mission through virtual and augmented reality interfaces. On the one hand, this system addresses some of the problems of current operations reported by the firefighters in our survey. It provides the professionals with enhanced information of the scenarios, having an impact on the efficiency of some tasks (e.g., vegetation preparation and fire surveillance) and the safety of some others (e.g., fire extinguishing). On the other hand, some challenges must be overcome, such as the scalability of the system, the training of operators, and the current limitations in the autonomy and communications of drones.

In future works, we are going to develop a complete simulation prototype of the system, as well as a minimum viable product (MVP) with real drones, in order to design, develop and validate the required algorithms.

**Author Contributions:** J.J.R.-G.: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing; A.B.: Funding acquisition, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing; E.G.-G.: Writing—original

draft, Investigation, Writing—review & editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Statistical results are contained within the article. Raw data are not publicly available due to data protection regulation.

**Acknowledgments:** This work has been partially developed within the "UAM Emprende" initiative of the "Universidad Autónoma de Madrid". The authors would like to thank the collaboration of the people involved in this initiative and especially Carlos Romero Moreno. Last but not least, the authors would like to express their gratitude to all the professionals that have taken part in the surveys and interviews. This paper would not have been possible without their knowledge and commitment.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

#### **Abbreviations**

The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript:


#### **References**

