Wildfire XPrize - Track B
Want to do something about Bushfires/Wildfires?
Good - so do we!
Want to join forces?
Need to know more?
Amhazing Pty Ltd is leading a team competing in Track B of the Wildfire XPrize and we’re growing our consortium and team. Details on the competition can be found at the XPrize website here.
As competitors we need to:
- Detect: Quickly detect high-risk fires before they can grow, within a 1000km2 rural region and autonomously distinguish decoy fires from those that need suppression.
and
- Suppress: Autonomously suppress it within 10 minutes from the point of detection.
XPrize is offering a $5M prize to the winner of track B.
Lockheed Martin is offering an additional $1M Accurate Detection Intelligence bonus prize.
Our Answer
BushfireNet is our end to end solution to the problem.
Given the magnitude of the challenge we've broken the problem down into separate smaller pieces so that we can solve it. You can find out more on our approach at BushfireNet.com
The Devil is in the Detail..
As you might imagine from the prize offered, the devil is in the detail! The solution has to:
- Be “ready” within less than 4 years (if not sooner!)
- Deployable in the “global south”.
- Autonomously operate drones: Man on the loop (not in it)
- Operate drones beyond visual range
- Operate in bad weather (windy, cloudy, rainy, hot/cold, lightning)
- Operate at night.
- Operate in difficult and remote terrain (mountainous, limited access, forested, possibly human occupied)
- Handle lack of communications infrastructure - i.e. make use of (at least) two communication paths.
- There are more complications outlined in the competition guidelines for those who want to know.
The Prize?
Whilst the prize money is one reason to compete, in practical terms it won’t cover the investment required to compete and rapidly develop solutions to meet the aspirational goal.
Competing in the XPrize provides focus. The deadline and constraints they've set provide a strong starting point for project work. But we aren't stopping there.
We've already found funding and sponsorship from a number of sources independently of XPrize so that we can kickstart our work.
For example Good Good Run Pty Ltd are sponsoring our 3,500 acre test facility. They've got a strong interest in the problem because of what happened in 2019/2020.
We aren't alone in this concern and action.
And the Australia government has already funded a traditional fire watch tower on the property.
No time to reinvent the wheel!
We can't meet the aggressive deadlines of the XPrize by re-inventing the wheel. That's why we started by putting together a team of people and commercial providers with existing experience and performance in this space.
We need this working next fire season. How do we make that happen?
Good Good Run
Developing an autonomous bushfire/wildfire detection and suppression solution is going to take work. To do that work we need a test bench and a practical use case. The Good Good test facility gives us that starting point as a team.
It’s a key part of our competitive advantage as there aren’t many teams out there with exclusive access to a property like ours.
The property is about 3 km by 4 km in size (13km2) and is surrounded by other large rural properties. It is located over 20 km from Bredbo and an hour and a half from the nation’s capital.
This size allows us a 1/100 th scale model of the final competition test area.
More about Good Good Run here.
Next Steps
If you want to get involved or still need more information, we're only too willing to discuss our plans.
We respect the fact that you may have intellectual property that you may wish to protect and we are making all efforts to fairly represent the contributions of partners and vendors.
We also recognise the need for people to be paid for their time and IP.
In many ways we see our job as showcasing the efforts of others by operating a development and demonstration environment where the wide range of work that's already been done on this problem can be displayed to the wider community.
Then based on that demonstration of performance, make commercial arrangements to expand and scale successful solutions on the proven basis that they can meet the needs of customers at the property ownership level up, all the way up to the federal government level and internationally.