A Firefighting Competition Like No Other Xprize has given us budget space travel, hyper-economical cars, and attempts to replicate the medical functions of Star Trek’s Tricorder. Now, the XPrize folks have turned their attentions to spotting and controlling wildfires by drones. This fits well with the Sustainable Aviation Foundation (underwriting this blog) and its concerns about spotting and controlling wildfires at the earliest opportunity. To counter this, XPrize has launched an $11 million comptetiton to, “Protect lives, forests, and the climate: Create breakthrough technologies that detect and extinguish destructive wildfires, enabling a future where people and healthy fire can safely coexist.” This challenge, promoting autonomous flight vehicles and the ability rapidly identify and extinguish incipient wildfires, initially drew 338 teams. These have been culled to 15 semifinalist groups. The Semifinalists This worldwide problem drew worldwide interest. The 15 teams are: Aerowatch of Barcelona, Spain Agni part of TRID Systems in Dresden, Germany Anduril, in Costa Mesa, California Crossfire, College Park, Maryland (see …
