Bearing-Based Finite-Time Fire Positioning and Fire Extinguishing Circumnavigation Control for Multiple Intelligent Firefighting Robots

Given the urgency and timeliness of the emergency response to fire, firefighting robots often struggle to locate the fire source accurately in a limited time and work efficiently to suppress fire. This article proposes finite-time fire positioning and fire extinguishing circumnavigation control algorithms for multiple intelligent firefighting robots (IFRs) based on bearing measurements, enabling them to quickly locate and efficiently extinguish the fire. First, a finite-time localization estimator is designed to enable all IFRs to quickly and precisely locate the fire, which utilizes the known positions of all IFRs and bearing measurements of the target fire. Furthermore, with the estimated fire position and change, a distributed circumnavigation control protocol is proposed for IFRs to perform all-round fire suppression and extinguishing. This protocol aims to drive the IFRs along dynamically varying circular trajectories with the desired enclosing distance, angular spacing, and tangential enclosing speed around the fire. Finally, numerical simulations and physical experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.