The GoAero Prize is a $2,000,000 chance to save the world – literally. A three-year search for solutions to the environmental disasters devastating our planet, the GoAero (Aerial Emergency Response Operations) Prize will go to the team creating an automated flight vehicle that can overcome formidable challenges.
Gwen Lighter is a veteran of such challenges, having created the earlier GoFly Prize that concentrated on merely getting a single pilot off the ground safely. Successful finalists spent three years reaching the “playoffs.”
This Next Three-Years’ Challenge
On the surface, the challenge sounds straightforward enough: “Design and build a safe, portable, robust, autonomy-enabled Emergency Response Flyer.”
Beneath that simple mission statement, things are significantly more difficult, requiring a vehicle to reach a disaster scene and perform a necessary mission. The craft should be able to demonstrate three main characteristics, being:
- Productive: Deploy on site and keep working day-in and day-out, reliably and efficiently.
- Versatile: All-theater, multi-environment, and robust so the important jobs are trusted to get done no matter what.
- Capable: Precision to complete unique tasks and with the agility to react and adapt to unpredictable environments.
Depending on the urban, rural, or remote locale of the emergency, the craft might:
- Retrieve an injured person from under a forest canopy
- Deliver (or retrieve) a firefighter on a burning hillside
- Retrieve a drowning victim at the beach
- Get a first responder to the scene in a dense urban environment (building, signs, wires, tight spaces)
- Get water and rations to communities cut off by natural disaster
- Evacuate flood victims
- Douse a nascent wildfire
- Rescue someone who has fallen through the ice on a frozen lake
- Locate / identify / observe an emergency situation
- Act as a fire truck “ladder extension”
- And myriad other possibilities.
Building Teams
As with the first GoFly Prize, the challenge is not about to be accomplished by a one-person army, but requires a carefully selected group with those “very special skills” usually reserved for action-movie heroes.
Two teams already noted by GoAero include the University of Calgary’s 4Front Robotics group headed by Dr. Alex Ramirez-Serrano. He “Has served as director of the manufacturing program and of the graduate program within the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at University of Calgary, is also the founder and director of the Robotarium Robotics research laboratory, where he performs R&D activities in advanced aerial and multi-legged robotic systems for operations inside geometrically complex spaces.”
The video shows one of his firm’s devices, with obvious possibilities for more.
Dr. Ramirez-Serrano has assembled a 12-person team, whose “Three goals are to develop an emergency response flyer that can perform tasks at ‘the highest speeds….at least 1.5 times faster than a human can do. It also needs to be able to maneuver in confined spaces, to be able to penetrate a space that no other aircraft can achieve. And it needs to have full autonomy, to analyze the situation, decide on how to proceed on the fly, and successfully complete the mission.’”
The other team featured in the Prize’s web site is headed by someone who did well in the previous competition. Team TREK president Robert Bulaga worked with Joshua Portlock and others over several years on a GoFly Prize project. Their Flycart made it through all phases of judging and seems to have had potential. Robert is highly experienced with ducted fans, probably a design element on many in this competition.
Bulaga’s own highly personal experience might explain his desire to compete in this challenge. “…It was watching an older brother become seriously ill and having his entire family med-evaced from Guam to Hawaii for his care that ‘left a lifelong impression on me.’” Indeed, his vivid recollection of that time – as well as recently seeing a good friend involved in a severe accident that required immediate access to emergency response – that spurred his interest and participation in the ‘GoAERO Prize’ competition.” His experience in aerospace over the last 45 years adds to qualifications for his team.
All the teams, with the assistance of almost 70 experts in the field working as advisors and mentors, will assure a significant outcome from this competition.
Why This May Be the Most Important Aerial Competition in Our Lifetimes
We know just from observation that a huge number of wildfires have decimated the country this years. To date this year, 38,673 fires have burned 7,916,313 acres. That required mobilizing “9,905 wildland firefighters and support personnel…assigned to incidents, including 12 complex incident management teams, 176 crews, 430 engines, 57 helicopters, [and] 3 complex incident management teams.” We know dozens of lives, including those of firefighters, have been lost and over 2,000 structures destroyed. Add to the losses from conflagrations the total destruction of islands and small towns along the East Coast just from Hurricane Helene’, and the consequences of global warming become all too apparent.
Something even more disturbing, the loss of tundra, or peat in the Arctic contributes to the loss of carbon sinks that would otherwise soak up the pervasive CO2 in our atmosphere. Such fires are difficult to control and smolder underground for perhaps centuries. Our ability to fight such un-natural disasters may be a weak link in our chain of prevention and suppression.
A recent article in Bloomberg’s helps spell out the existential threating hanging over all of us. The article’s headline stuns. “From Siberia to Brazil, wildfires are moving underground and burning up massive carbon deposits. The resulting emissions threaten to worsen global warming.” As the Sustainable Aviation Foundation points out, CO2 produced by wildfires is being shown to be greater than that produced by all the fossil fuel burning in our mechanized world. This vicious cycle amplifies global warming from manmade and natural sources combining in an ever-tightening feedback loop.
Things seem to be leading to greater fires, more and worse hurricanes, tornadoes, and the consequent need to rescue victims. The GoAero Prize is a key to responding to these disasters. Let’s all do “our bit” as the British said during the Blitz. No matter how small, each act of lowering the demands on our planet can help. We’re going to have lots of people, property and land to rescue, retrieve, and aid in the meantime.