Enhanced data gathering for firefighting applications

In buildings with enough network infrastructure, there is a fire alarm network controlled by a Fire Alarm Control Panel (FACP) and interfaced with the overall building network. When a fire starts in the building, the FACP takes some actions to facilitate evacuation and firefighting procedures. The fire alarm network, already fire protected, continues to operate on batteries. The fire department dispatches fire fighters to the site. Often, fire fighters can suffer from many injuries and fatalities due to the lack of information about the fire site. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant network of robots to be deployed in a building with any number of floors and communicate with the fire alarm network through the FACP. Wi-Fi and LTE interfaces need to be added to the FACP to allow for this functionality. The main purpose of the robots is to scout the region, send live video stream as well as different measurements from the site to the Incident Commander (IC) while other firefighting procedures are carried out in parallel. Throughout the paper, the network is designed and tested for proper functionality, and an Ethernet-based on-board network for robots is proposed and successfully simulated.