Albatross: Unmanned self-sustainable glider for forest fire detection

Each year, between 60,000 and 80,000 forest fires occur, destroying between 3 and 10 million hectares. Therefore, it becomes vital that it is detected and prevented at their premature stage. This tragedy is mostly caused by rising global temperatures, lightning, as well as other human factors like land conversion for agriculture and poor forest management. Albatross is a self-sustaining glider with a wingspan of 2.8m that will aid in early detection of forest fires, thereby limiting the scope of damage. It glides at an altitude of 240ft and transmits live feeds of the region it is covering to the base station for image processing, alerting the officials in charge with the exact GPS location if any fire/smoke is detected. The major advantage of this glider over other drones is that it is energy efficient. It can cruise for a longer period of time using the solar panels embedded on the wings and has an energy storage unit for powering it in the night. SOLIDWORKS and ANSYS software were used to analyze the stresses and displacements at every point on the wing to obtain an optimal aerodynamic design. A group of gliders deployed to monitor a forest of area 4000 km2 such as the Abujmarh forest in Chhattisgarh, is one such application of the project. This would be a cheap and effective solution for forest fire prevention compared to other existing methods such as ground based temperature sensors and satellite imaging.