Skip to main content

Researchers are using autonomous fire-bombing drones to prevent future wildfires

According to data from the National Interagency Fire Center, 2015 was the worst year on record for wildfires in the United States. In the past year alone, the US has experienced well over 50,000 wildfires, which have collectively burned over 11 million acres of land so far. But thanks to some forward-thinking engineers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we might soon have a new weapon in the fight against forest fires. Their solution? An autonomous fire-bombing drone.
Recommended Videos

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but the drone doesn’t just haphazardly set the wilderness alight and then buzz back to home base. Instead, this drone is designed to autonomously execute and monitor prescribed burns. Controlled, pre-meditated burns (a common land management practice) help reduce wildfire risk by eliminating dry plant material that could potentially act as fuel for a blaze. Currently, these burns are executed by either a team of people on the ground, or by helicopters; making them time consuming, dangerous, and expensive.

fire drone
Craig Chandler/UNL

To remedy this problem and make controlled burns cheaper and easier, a team of students from UNL developed the Unmanned Aerial System for Fire Fighting, or UAS-FF: an autonomous quadcopter drone that dispenses fire starting balls along a predetermined path. At first glance the balls look like they belong on a ping pong table — but they’ve actually got a bunch of chemical wizardry going on under the hood. Each ball is filled with potassium permanganate powder, and is injected with liquid polyethylene glycol before being dropped. This sets off a slow chemical reaction that causes the ball to burst into flame after several seconds. By dropping a series of these balls along a predetermined pattern, the UAS-FF drone can effectively start a controlled burn.

“The problem that we’re trying to address with this is how to start controlled fires for land management in safe and effective ways,” said UAS-FF co-creator Carrick Detweiler. The UAS-FF system is still a prototype at this point, but the team has successfully performed indoor tests, and hopes to move on to outdoor trials in the next few months. Detweiler said the researchers have been working with the Federal Aviation Administration, and hope to have authorization from the FAA and fire departments for a field test sometime around March of 2016.

Drew Prindle
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
Future armies could use teams of drones and robots to storm buildings
Ghost robotics

AI Empowered Robots Perform Indoor Surveillance

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, an Israeli defense firm that dates back to the 1940s, has shown off a new artificial intelligence-powered system that lets drones and robots enter buildings together to scan the insides in order to create maps.

Read more
Autonomous drones are helping to keep a U.S. Air Force base in California secure
Easy Aerial drone

Travis Air Force, Easy Aerial partner up for Autonomous Drone Based Security Operations

Security is a big concern when it comes to the military, and the powers that be have no shortage of impressive, cutting-edge technologies they can call into service to help achieve this goal. We recently wrote about the deployments of dog robots to patrol Tyndall Air Force Base near to Panama City, Florida. Now Travis Air Force Base in California is testing out autonomous drones to help keep the goings-on at the military site away from prying eyes.

Read more
Smellicopter is an autonomous, scent-chasing drone made with real moth antennas
Smellicopter

There's no doubt that 2020 has been a strange year. So strange, in fact, that the idea of an obstacle-dodging, autonomous cyborg drone that uses a real live moth antenna to track down smells doesn’t sound too much like weird science fiction. That’s probably a good thing, too, because it’s something that researchers from the University of Washington have actually built. And they’ve called it Smellicopter, because ... why the heck not?

“The ability to detect and localize odors has a vast range of potential applications,” Thomas Daniel, a UW professor of biology, told Digital Trends. “Essentially, anywhere we might use dogs for tracking or sensing odors is a potential application for the Smellicopter. It has ... the unique advantage that it flies and can navigate in complex environments. Moreover, it avoids putting dogs or humans in harm’s way. Everything from detecting gas leaks to disease outbreaks in crops to the volatiles emitted from [improvised explosive device] are potential areas of application.”

Read more