SBIR Phase II: Intelligent Drone Ignitions To Manage Fires

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will be to transform how firefighters battle wildfires by improving safety, decreasing costs, and increasing effectiveness. Wildfires are increasing in number and severity, costing billions of dollars and resulting in thousands of lost homes and numerous deaths. Today, firefighters are unable to perform the backburns needed to contain wildfires without putting firefighters at risk. This project will result in technologies that directly address the critical pain points of firefighters by improving the intelligence and capabilities of drone systems. The research will develop algorithms for coordinating groups of robots, deep learning approaches and the development of novel datasets, algorithms that can predict fire activity and plan missions, and autonomous health monitoring approaches. This project will lead to safe, fast, affordable fire management. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will enable the development of the critical pieces of the technology that will transform fire management. More specifically, the proposed work focuses on the following key technical challenges and activities to incorporate intelligence into fire management: 1) Scaling to multiple drones intelligently operating in tandem and larger drones to cover complex, large terrain faster; 2) Transformation of pre- and post-fire mapping, currently a manual process taking more time than actual firefighting; 3) Creation of intelligent ignition planning and automated sensing capabilities that predict and take into account fire activity to increase safety and efficiency; and 4) Beta tests with customers to collect data for learning algorithms and to validate the research under field conditions. These challenges are especially difficult given the harsh fire environment, the weight and power constraints of commercial drones preferred for these activities, and the integration of two distinct domains, drone aerial navigation and fire management. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.