Silicon Valley students take on pros with wildfire drones.
By Dronelife Features Editor Jim Magill
The prestigious XPRIZE competition to find innovative solutions to battle the global threat of wildfires has attracted teams from all over the world, including teams of professional firefighters and first responders, teams representing drone and software industry professionals and teams of university faculty and graduate students.
Yet, in addition to all the distinguished competitors, the finals event in the competition, set to take place across a wide expanse of Alaskan territory next month, will also feature a team of bright and energetic high school students, from Valley Christian, a K–12 school in the heart of Silicon Valley. The team of 20 students, led by drone and artificial intelligence (AI) industry professionals, is using drones and high-fidelity sensors to detect potentially dangerous wildfires at their outset and extinguish them before they can grow and become destructive infernos.
Working in a strategic partnerships with Kaizen Aerospace, a developer of heavy-lift autonomous UAVs, and SensoRy AI, a developer of sensor tools to provide ultra-early detection of wildfires and methane gas leaks, the team of young innovators has developed a system that can help deal with the growing worldwide scourge of potentially deadly blazes.
“It’s actually a really cool piece of technology that’s obviously being furthered by competitive landscapes such as XPRIZE,” Andrew Valkenburg, executive vice president of technology and manufacturing at Kaizen’s parent company, Powerus, said in an interview.
The Wildfire Quest system employs sensor nodes that can be ground-based — either mounted on array towers and powered by generators or transported by vehicles — or carried aloft by drones. The highly sensitive sensors are designed to pick up traces of light, heat or smoke across a wide range of land surfaces.
Those sensor inputs are fused into our Kaizen’s XNav sensor fusion algorithm. In addition to sensor fusion, the XNav software also serves as the drone’s autonomous flight control ecosystem.
“I can physically pilot the drones and program their waypoints as well as I can reconfigure how they fly in XNav,” Valkenburg said. “And then there’s a few other things you can do; fleet management to make sure your drones are managed and maintained, and terrain planning too.”
Terrain can prove to be a limiting factor in the detection and suppression of wildfires, which most often ignite in rugged or remote areas. “I need a sensor to be able to detect or predict what’s going to happen. And if there’s a large land mass, like a mountain in my way, I might not be able to see that,” Valkenburg said. “So XNav actually helps us to plan out where those sensors should be for best coverage as well.”
Once the software package has fused all the sensor inputs and charted out the lay of the land and determined what the current operating picture is, it’s able to autonomously deploy the firefighting drones to launch and to fly out to the target location, where they can then drop their payloads of fire-retardant bombs.
Students Compete on Level Playing Field
For Joshua Guo, a Valley Christian student who serves as the electrical engineering lead on the Wildfire Quest team, the XPRIZE competition has given him an opportunity to apply his scientific and technical skills in attempting to solve a real-world problem in a contest that places him on equal footing with much more experienced competitors.
“I first heard about XPRIZE when reading an online article about inventions,” he said. “I would say inventions are undervalued in society, and that they don’t happen enough because I guess they’re not rewarded, because they take effort, and based on my personal experience, it’s tough.”
As a southern California resident, Guo has a personal stake in the efforts to combat wildfires.
“A few years ago, during the wildfires that happened in Santa Cruz, one struck up near my house, and it was just a few miles away. We had to pack our bags, salvage all the memories we could get, and just do as much as we could to evacuate,” he said.
“And in that moment, I was just thinking, ‘Is there really nothing I can do about this?’” he asked. “And I guess with XPRIZE Wildfire, when I first heard about the program and the opportunity to compete, it was: ‘That’s the answer to my question.’”
Guo said that although he was somewhat intimidated by the competition he would face in the challenge, he soon learned to overcome those feelings.
“Seeing these companies and universities as being our competitors, it can be, ‘Whoa, what am I supposed to do as a high school student?’” he said. “But throughout this XPRIZE competition, I’ve pushed past limits that I’ve never known I could.”
$11 Million in Prize Money
In the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, teams from around the world took part in a series of competitive rounds, vying for a chance to win all or part of a prize package worth a total of $11 million. Each team that survived one round of the contest received a potion of the prize money, with the grand prize- winning team set to receive $2.5 million.
“The first round, the qualifying submission, is completely on paper. You put your ideas and logistics all on paper and submit to XPRIZE, and through that, XPRIZE is able to evaluate the viability of your initial ideas and solution,” Guo said. “And through that, you can qualify for teams testing, which when is you submit a video of your solution, your basic prototype.”
The students of Valley Christian initially designed and built their first prototypes for the project and after the team qualified for the semifinal round, it then partnered with Kaizen Aerospace to take advantage of the company’s expertise in the operation of heavy-lift drones. “That’s when we really put our solution together, and we did a bunch of testing.”
In the semifinal round of competition, the Wildfire Quest team was required to select a location where they could set a fire, in order to test their system under real-world conditions. The team picked the South Bay Fire Academy, located just a few miles from the school.
Throughout the different rounds of competition, the team continued to innovate their fire-detection and -suppression system. The basic concept of the prize competition is to design a system that can speedily detection and suppress a fire in ways that surpass traditional fire-fighting methods.
“So, for the finals, we’re using drones to detect and drones to suppress. They all run on complex AI models and software,” Guo said. For the suppression phase, the team is using a heavy-lift UAV that’s able to deploy fire-suppression capsules, which the students are engineering themselves.
“Initially, we used fire-retardant balls that explode upon contact with fire, but of course, we can always improve and we can always change up. The fire-suppression capsules that the team plans to deploy in the final leg of the competition explode on contact with the fire and disperse a fire-retardant powder to extinguish the blaze.
The final round of the competition will be held sometime in mid-June in the NANA Region of Alaska, a 1,000-square-kilometer rural region close to Fairbanks. Competing teams will be judged on their ability to detect a wildfire somewhere within the vast region and put out the blaze in the shortest amount of time.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
