High-rise building fires pose a serious threat to the lives and property safety of people. The lack of reliable and accurate positioning means is one of the main difficulties faced by rescuers. In the absence of prior knowledge of the high-rise building fire environment, the coverage deployment of mobile base stations is a challenging problem that has not received much attention in the literature. This paper studies the problem of the autonomous optimal deployment of base stations in high-rise building fire environments based on a UAV group. A novel problem formulation is proposed that solves the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) positioning problem in complex and unknown environments. The purpose of this paper is to realize the coverage and deployment of mobile base stations in complex and unknown fire environments. The NLOS positioning problem in the fire field environment is turned into the line-of-sight (LOS) positioning problem through the optimization algorithm. And there are more than three LOS base stations nearby at any point in the fire field. A control law which is formulated in a mathematically precise problem statement is developed that guarantees to meet mobile base stations' deployment goals and to avoid collision. Finally, the positioning accuracy of our method and that of the common method were compared under many different cases. The simulation result showed that the positioning error of a simulated firefighter in the fire field environment was improved from more than 10 m (the positioning error of the traditional method) to less than 1 m.
Keywords: autonomous deployment; collaborative positioning; fire rescue; swarm intelligence; trajectory planning.