Real-Time Control of a Rescue Drone for Efficient Firefighting Operations: Embedded Systems and StateFlow Integration

Drones have a transformative impact in firefighting, where time is of significance and every second matters in saving lives. This paper presents an embedded system for real-time control of a rescue drone that gathers and transmits critical information to firefighters, so they can make decisions as they travel to the area, save time, and avoid the risks of entering areas where there are no victims. The drone is modeled as a hybrid system with a dynamical system that exhibits both discrete events and continuous time states. The complexity of the drone's behavior is accurately modeled using hybrid Statecharts, allowing it to navigate through continuous physical space while responding to discrete events such as victim identification and communication with the firefighters. The drone's modes of operation are modeled and simulated using Stateflow (MATLAB/Simulink), providing results for the drone's motors' speeds which are controlled using PD control to follow a certain trajectory. Finally, Processor-in-the-Loop testing (PiL) is applied and it validates that the generated C code works on the targeted hardware (Raspberry Pi 3B).