A Portable Situational Awareness Toolset for Wildfire Suppression and Team Management

A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration summary documented 20 wildfire events between 1980 and 2021 that caused $1 billion or more in damages and noted that 16 of those have occurred since 2000. With the increase in damage and physical scope of these fires, larger and more diverse teams are required to address them. Each responding team may have different communication equipment, preventing one team from communicating with another except through a command center that must relay activities and events to each group individually. This limits the operational picture of the fire incident to a select person / few people who must coordinate all elements directly. A team led by Systems Technology, Inc., in collaboration with Bolder Flight Systems Inc., proposes to develop the Firefighter Integrated Reporting System and Transponder (FIRST) system to provide an enhanced wildfire situational awareness (SA) toolset and airspace management capability suitable for both piloted and autonomous air assets. At its core, FIRST will provide the fire incident managers with the ability to track and direct both piloted and autonomous aircraft. Tracking will be facilitated via existing air traffic protocols including ADS-B, the unmanned aircraft system traffic management system, and the newer FAA UAS Remote ID standard. These methods will be augmented via FIRST’s hardware element, a low cost, size, weight, and power solution that will provide GPS / INS measurements from each vehicle, direct control of the associated UAS, and will enable the radio mesh network that forms the backbone of the communication architecture for FIRST. The information will be hosted on a smart device display to enable the widest applicability and provide information akin to what a traditional air traffic controller might usually see: aircraft identifying information, speed, altitude, direction, and specific to the firefighting mission, the kind/amount of retardant and or payload available by aircraft.