Combating Wildland Fires – What Will It Take to Push the Next Generation of Firefighting Drones?

 

Photo: "This city is burning." by KTIQS.LCV is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

As fire crews continue to battle what will hopefully be the final flaming acres of this January’s devastating wildfires throughout Los Angeles, our team is taking a collective sigh of relief that this march of devastation has been stopped. While our community here in Southern California is no stranger to the almost annual rage of wildfires, these recent episodes have been the most catastrophic our team has endured since settling here in Torrance.  

For our team of aviation engineers, programmers, and technicians, much of the conversation around the proverbial watercooler here at A2Z HQ has been about some of the amazing drone applications that have been brought to bear in fighting wildfires. Being entrenched in many of the drone industry developments, our team was aware of some of the more high-profile firefighting UAV tools out there, but the conversation also drove us to dig deeper into what other companies and researchers are developing for this use case. The results of that investigation have been enlightening, and have turned our team’s attention to exploring more deeply how the transformative nature of unmanned aerial vehicles can improve the life-saving capabilities at the fingertips of the fire crews.

So, let's take a look at the innovative tools that firefighting teams are already deploying to prevent, predict, and combat wildfires, and see where this incredibly impactful technology may further improve their capabilities.

Current Firefighting Drone Capabilities
The law enforcement community has been rapidly adopting UAVs serving drone-as-first-responder (DFR) roles for years now. From terrestrial drones that help keep first responders out of harm’s way to the more recent adoption of sUAS platforms that provide quick response situational awareness, your news feed is no doubt full of success stories where drones have assisted in solving crimes, helped search and rescue teams locate victims quickly, etc. For firefighting crews, drone platforms have been largely focused on providing situational awareness, optimizing response strategies, and improving safety for ground crews.

Photo: "Druid Complex" by YellowstoneNPS is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Some of the key applications for drones in this sector currently include:

  • Improving Strategic Efficacy: Providing a real-time bird’s-eye-view of a wildfire, even traditional camera drones deliver potent intelligence to ground teams strategizing the best approach to combating wildfires. Cost-effective and quicker to deploy than traditional helicopter or fixed-wing aerial assets, drones help fire crews determine smoke patterns, detect spot fires using onboard infrared cameras, and provide intelligence on the behavior of the fire itself so teams can more efficiently deploy ground assets.

  • Enhancing Personnel Safety: Firefighting is, obviously, extremely dangerous work, and the blaze itself is just one of the dangers they must face. Often operating in the dark or minimal visibility conditions, fire crews can rely on overhead drones to help locate victims for search and rescue operations, and identify potential hazardous materials in the path of the fire, and the UAS systems can operate in smokey conditions that would ground traditional air assets.

  • Streamlining Civilian Communication in Fire Zones: Wildfires start quickly and can grow extremely rapidly in a short period, especially under the dry and extremely windy conditions LA faced this January. While mass notification alerts can notify residents of evacuation orders, as infrastructure breaks down during a fire, first responders are also deployed to endangered residential areas to knock doors and make announcements over loudspeakers alerting residents it is time to leave. Unmanned aerial vehicles are being deployed to bridge this gap in multiple ways. First, drones equipped with megaphones are expediting this door-to-door communication effort. Additionally, communications companies brought real-time cellular communications to firefighting teams and offline residential neighborhoods with systems like AT&T's Flying COWs (Cell on Wings).

Innovative Firefighting Drone Payloads
Leveraging the unique advantages of drones in preventing, detecting, and fighting wildfires has increased dramatically in recent years. In fact, CalFire has been among the leaders pushing to expand cutting-edge drone deployments before, during, and after incidents. As demand has grown, so have the specialized payloads necessary for these phases of wildfire detection and response. There are some amazing drone payloads currently available, including:

  • Fire Detection Capabilities: Early detection is one of the most crucial tactics for combating wildfires. Mitigation teams have used fire watch cameras equipped with high-definition and infrared cameras for quite a while to monitor for smoke plumes. Now, this technology is being augmented by AI computer vision technology. Some of this capability is also being added to drones, like the SmokeD tethered drone-in-a-box solution that can be mounted in a truck bed for mobile deployment.

  • Aerial Deployed Dragon Eggs: In 2017, researchers at the University of Nebraska developed small spheres of potassium permanganate which, when punctured and injected with glycol, burst into flame. The ping pong ball-sized accelerants became known as “dragon eggs,” and were subsequently brought to market as a purpose-built drone platform by DroneAmplified. The specialty payload enables firefighters to streamline their backburning practices reaching areas that are difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous for fire crews to access.

  • Post-Fire Mapping and Inspection: Once fire crews have packed up their camps, aerial mapping drones with LiDAR and photogrammetry payloads are often deployed to survey the fire damage. This post-event mapping streamlines the assessment of impacted infrastructure, ecological habitats, and watersheds. With mapping being one of the early use cases for commercial drones, there is no shortage of available sensor arrays and airframe options from long-distance fixed-wing craft to more maneuverable multirotor drones.

While all of these legacy systems and these latest adaptations serve their unique role in predicting, preventing, and combating wildfires, each still functions as a standalone system. The US Forest Service has been investing heavily in its drone capabilities over the last several years bringing many of these disparate systems under a single operational umbrella, but there are still challenges to overcome to improve response efforts. One of the major constraints on its capabilities continues to be battery life which hinders longer range deployment. So, there is room for improvement as comprehensive holistic systems emerge.

What Does the Future Hold for Firefighting Drones?
The churning engine of innovation is always hard at work, especially in the cutting-edge drone sector. As some of the above-mentioned technologies continue to evolve and come to market, there are still barriers to break through.

Researchers at the University of Bristol in the UK have been exploring leveraging AI-powered drones and swarm technology to autonomously detect and respond to wildfires with fire suppression materials, especially automating the entire detect and response effort. While this capability is very exciting, the large fixed-wing cargo drones upon which it is being built present their own cost-benefit balance. While the fixed-wing crafts maximize range, loiter times, and payload capacity for fire retardants, these crafts require traditional runway infrastructure to operate which prolongs the time-to-target for wildfire response.

Another exciting research project underway at the University of California – Davis is exploring advanced chemical sensors that can detect wildfires before they even reach a smoke point for visual identification. The researchers plan to monitor environmental conditions with remote wind, moisture, and temperature sensors, and when those conditions reach levels of concern for potential wildfire, they would deploy their drone-borne chemical array to the area to sweep for nascent wildfires.

Conclusion
While the recent wildfires that devastated portions of Los Angeles have been trying on our entire community, and recovery efforts are just beginning, there is hope that technological advancements can help mitigate such disastrous future events. The drone industry is certainly going to be at the tip of that spear pushing the boundaries to help predict, prevent, and combat wildfires.

Ultimately, the next generation of firefighting drone systems will likely see many of these disparate payloads and stand-alone systems consolidate into a single holistic platform that can autonomously patrol large areas for early-stage wildfires, rapidly respond with fire mitigation measures, and provide the eye-in-the-sky intelligence that fire crews require.

How do we address the battery limitations for drones in firefighting?

We already have the capability to eliminate the range limitations the US Forest Service has experienced with multi-use drone dock infrastructure like our automatic charging A2Z AirDocks. A network of sharable, scalable, low-maintenance AirDocks could be set up across wildfire-prone regions, enabling infrared and AI-powered fire monitoring systems to function nearly around the clock. The same multi-use network could also support drones with varying payloads, making a swarm of fire suppressant drones ready to deploy instantly to tamp down wildfires while they are small and biding time for larger assets to be mobilized, and providing a base of operations for the real-time intelligence-gathering during fire suppression operations.

 
Tyler Caros