The XPrize Foundation had a significant announcement last week, the five finalists in the Wildfire Detection and Suppression Challange. The Foundation describes the wildfire competition this way: “Competitors in the Autonomous Wildfire Response Track are developing fully autonomous solutions to detect and suppress a high-risk fire in 10 minutes or less over a large, environmentally complex area roughly the size of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose combined, while avoiding decoy fires—a challenge that has never been tackled at this scale and scope before. These technologies have the potential to transform how fires are detected, managed, and fought, with a rate 4x faster than current best practices and shortening the time between detection and rapid response, minimizing negative impacts.” The competition is based on two tracks with a bonus high-speed fire detection prize, again quoting from the official XPrize Wildfire web site: “Track A: Space-Based Wildfire Detection and Intelligence tests teams’ ability to detect fires across vast, environmentally challenging landscapes …
