Plus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an environmental investigator in government who was regularly brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FLIR/IR looking for grow ops and do paralell construction when they were more illegal as well.<p>Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
On a day where there is actually high fire risk (ie. high wind in hot weather) this system will be too late and not deliver enough retardant to make any difference. In those conditions you will have tens or hundreds of square meters of fire in within that time. Actual fire ignition will usually not be in the open away from other materials as shown in the example. It may be able to stop fires on days when conditions are mild enough to let it run for the ecosystem benefits.
It looks like they're just dropping Elide Fire Balls, an existing fire extinguishing product of limited commercial success. I'd wager due to their high cost, they run something like $100 a piece... As much as a good fire extinguisher. Of course if this worked that could be a significant cost savings compared to sending a crew, but the Fire Balls are intended for enclosed environments and require direct fire exposure to activate... I just can't see it really being a reliable way to extinguish a nascent wildfire.<p>The video reeks of being a demo thrown together in a weekend. The cuts to debug output are just goofy and the actual fire demo is extremely contrived. The hard part of this, in my mind, is detection... And they don't tell us really anything about how they intend to handle the complex logistics of drones canvassing a substantial forest.
I'm very intrigued by the potential for new wildfire tech but as someone who lives in wildfire land in Montana i have my doubts about this video... detecting putting out a campfire is a pretty idealized case.<p>Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc</a><p>The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out.<p>I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.
Yeah. No. As Mr. Wonderful like to say, take it behind the barn and shoot it.<p>Even a swarm of these cannot compare to the awesome power of small and large (Sikorsky) helicopters as well as medium to large (Boeing 707-class) tanker aircraft attacking a fire.<p>I have lived in fire country half my life. You NEVER get to fires when it's a convenient pile of logs in the middle of an accessible clearing that a drone can hover 20 feet above to precision drop suppressant balls. The more likely scenario is that, by the time it is detected you have to drop swimming-pool quantities of water or suppressant multiple times. And, of course, let's not even discuss a decent amount of wind and everything that goes with the situational awareness that pilots have.
This is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0].<p>Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fire-mapping" rel="nofollow">https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...</a>
Conveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area? This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.
If you look at recent California fires, those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) which would make drone flight impossible. Besides, such events spread to several acres within minutes of initiation. Dropping a few water balloons will do absolutely nothing.<p>Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were over 10,000 lighting strikes in one night in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. These drones would have been completely useless here as well.<p>The video also claims that a single drone can handle 40 acres. There are over 800 million acres of forest in the US. Buying 20 million drones is one thing, but keeping them flying is pretty much inconceivable given how quickly most toys of this sort quit working under field conditions.
The reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small, localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives.<p>I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run.<p>Take those drones and replace the water bombs with extra fuel tanks or batteries, so they can fly longer. Have automated patrols looking for fires daily, so that we can control small forest fires carefully- while letting them burn.
Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
I really don't get why we haven't figured out how to do controlled burns properly, lots of indigenous cultures had been doing it successfully for at least hundreds of years. And they did it all without fancy technology. I think it might just come down to the arrogance of trying to exert control over a forest rather than work symbiotically with natural processes.<p>I never thought about the liability angle, hopefully legislation can address that to make controlled burns more viable.
I'm going to be a downer here, and would bet that since this system requires lots of drones flying around to identify fires that it's more likely for one of those sensor drones to crash and cause a fire rather than actually identifying a fire small enough for a few "fire ball" retardants to extinguish an actual fire.
It looks like the explosive force of the Poké balls is actually spreading embers from the fire. And as they fly through the air the dusty / gaseous suppressant will be blown off, and the hard core of the solid glowing ember will continue flying to a new landing spot where it can spread the fire anew. Oops.
Not a big fan of the noise pollution. The woods are one of the last places we can go to listen to animals, the wind or silence.<p>I guess this is fine if it's only deployed when necessary but I definitely don't want these things buzzing around preemptively.
It seems like the extinguishing agent would likely spread embers based on how concussive it looked.<p>I would love to learn the user research yall did. Hit me up if you’d like to speak with a recently retired smokejumper. You’re essentially looking to take them out of business (which is fine by me) but fires are never this small or controlled. They’re usually in an area of 1-5 acres and I don’t see how this setup scales to that magnitude.<p>I didn’t read all of the comments but I didn’t read any that mentioned this.
Just wondering what the range is on those drones. If you are supposed to be covering 100's of km of bushland you will need a significant number of drones, or they will need to have high speed and long range.<p>Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.
I do wonder about the range given the payload is by necessity pretty heavy<p>Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based ignitions, or in high wind in general
Look, the use case might be presented as ignition suppression, but I can see this being much more useful for a different use case.<p>I was involved with the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe, California. That fire had a massive line put in for days, but a big wind caused multiple ignitions behind the line at night. The wind and the night prevented aircraft from flying. But drones like these could have flown. And they could have managed the tough terrain. And they could have suppressed the spot fires beyond the line, and helped that line to hold. And that would have meant potentially saving a city. Don't get me wrong, South Lake Tahoe survived due to hard work and a lot of luck, but as we know entire cities are burning and the loss of that line wiped entire neighborhoods off the map. These machines need to be scaled up to handle significant suppression requirements — something far bigger than these drones capable of helping hold a line and work in difficult conditions. I don't think small drones are it. But precision delivery, and the fact that you get immediate feedback on the effectiveness of the suppression from the drone, could be really incredible.
Neat tech, but I think prescribed burns are probably better for the general health of the forest ecology. Furthermore, prescribed burn uses a smaller tech stack (less dependencies on high tech) and is more resilient to logisitical and tech failures.<p>Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when designing a site.
I wonder if the accurate deliver of fire retardant could be achieved using automated mortars or similar, maybe terminal guidance munition delivered from a high level loitering airship. Your cost may be higher, but I'm thinking that there will be a significant loss rate with drones, and you lose the cost of prepositioning.
The surveillance and response part is interesting. I can't imagine drones that size can deliver an effective response. Especially if the fire is in a tree crown (lightning strike) and not in a neat bounded campfire ring.<p>Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
How are they going to get this thing on-site in 10 minutes? and I have a hard time believing a brushfire in parched areas is going to stay small enough to contain in that time. Have they seen how quickly a room in a house can be completely ablaze?
I wonder what historically unnatural hunting of large predators, to the point of near extinction, causes on ecosystems.<p>Does it alter the food chain through herbivores and, in turn, alter the vegetation pervasive, such that it's more combustable?
The concept is interesting, but would not be easy to deploy the extinguisher agent like they where some kind of artillery shell? Use drones to patrol and find fires, and then just bombard the position from distance?
They set fire to a pile of tinder surrounded by a rather large ring consisting of a few large branches and logs. Then during descent, not only has the fire visibly burned out on its own, but there was barely any material there to begin with. Then in the extinguishing shot, the fire is all of a sudden raging again, but with a bunch of new wood that wasn't in the original fire. Then at the end everything is completely burned and charred (but still strongly smoldering), exactly as it would look if the fire had burned itself out within its natural boundary -- not actually impeded or stopped in some way.<p>Being able to autonomously send a drone to a specific location is not new. Using a sensor on a drone to detect a certain thing and perform an action is not new. So the only innovation in regard to "containing wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition" that actually matters is how to handle the fire, and they didn't address that part of it at all.<p>Everything about this video reeks of cheap tricks from a children's magic kit, and the whole thing feels like another dime-a-dozen startup scam looking for a quick buyout before anyone realizes they've been duped.
If they dropped incendiaries during planned burning in cool weather then the fuel loads wouldn’t build up to become mega-fires on hot, windy days in summer.<p>The Australian CSIRO developed a similar project in the 1970’s but socialists shut it down, along with forest industry, to win elections during the 1980’s
I do wonder how they're going to get enough coverage. There are plenty of places where a fire might start that are dozens of miles from the nearest road. You'd presumably want to deploy the base camps in some sort of grid, which would mean a whole lot of hiking things in on horses.
Hi guys/gals, (I know HN typically prefers comments with more substance but) I just want to praise what an amazing project this is and I like how this has a real potential of saving lives, property and ecosystem. I wish you are able materialize your mission!
Meanwhile in the world of forest management: <a href="https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire" rel="nofollow">https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire</a>
That's interesting.<p>But given that heat rises, I wonder how effective it would be against bigger fires. Maybe if it had a little side-launch capacity it could be even more capable?
Direct link to their video:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW_O1WKdMdY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW_O1WKdMdY</a>
I can totally see this being adapted for crowd control. Gathering has exceeded X amount of allowed people in one area, deploy tear gas and countermeasures.
It would make more sense to have this at home. Just smaller one that puts out small fires quickly. Convince regulators that every home needs one. Profit.
What could possibly go wrong I wonder?<p>I can only image what happens once people realize this is a new vector for swatting. Wonder if it will get a new name.
its actually really cool to see something my team and i pitched as a concept a couple years ago for a grad project now turning into reality with drones.
The more effective rapid fire fighting becomes, perversely there is more demand to tolerate more fuel near structures because there is less expectation of losses. If that demand is met, when the rapid response fails, the fire will be more catastrophic.<p>It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable confidence.