Wildfire detection from space and firefighting drones featured among the finalists honored in the $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition. Although no team walked away with either of the two grand prizes, such technologies could prove helpful as the world grapples with the growing costs of worsening wildfire disasters.
The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. A second Autonomous Response Prize track challenged teams to autonomously detect and put out a high-risk fire located somewhere within rural Alaska while ignoring decoy fires—all within 10 minutes of the fire igniting.
“We want to be able to prepare and provide tools for firefighters to really allow them to do the best job,” saidAndrea Santy, program director ofXPRIZE Wildfire, in an interview with Ars. “They’re great at what they do, but it’s unfair to continue to put them in harm’s way when there’s technology coming online that can help keep them safe, keep communities safe, and protect ecosystems.”
The competition saw 45 qualified technical submissions in the space-based detection track and initially drew more than 300 teams from around the world in the Autonomous Response track. The latter challenge in particular attracted a diverse array of proposed technological solutions in the early stages.
“At the very beginning, we saw things likesound being able to put out a fire, lasers and all sorts of robotics like robotic dogs,” Santy told Ars. “We had ground systems and aerial systems.”
But as theXPRIZE Wildfire judgesfocused on the most practical solutions for finding and suppressing a fire in 10 minutes, they weeded out technologies that would have a harder time meeting the time and geography requirements.
