Team “Crossfire” Advances to Phase II of XPRIZE Wildfire Semifinals
A team of University of Maryland students, faculty and staff associated with the XPRIZE competition to end destructive wildfires has advanced to the final round of semifinals to be held in October, moving forward in a race to develop an autonomous detection and suppression system set to work in minutes.
The interdisciplinary team, with members of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, Department of Aerospace Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Uncrewed Aircraft Systems Research and Operations Center (UROC), xFoundry@UMD and the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute (MFRI), are one of the 15 teams to advance in the competition’s $5M Autonomous Wildfire Response Track—which is focused on developing autonomous systems that attack the fire within minutes of detection.
Although fire is essential to ecosystems in clearing dead vegetation and supporting regeneration, destructive wildfires are an escalating global threat; the autonomous wildfire response track is aimed at designing technologies that would prevent destructive fires from growing out of control.
“Our multidisciplinary team has shown that UMD has the right people to address these problems. It’s been very rewarding to bring our knowledge and skills while working closely with aerospace and mechanical engineers on both sides of the challenge,” said Fernando Raffan Montoya, assistant professor in fire protection engineering and a technical lead in the team.
With the challenge to develop an autonomous system that detects and suppresses a high-risk fire in under 10 minutes across a 1,000 km² area while ignoring decoy fires, team “Crossfire” is working towards an integrated model that combines unmanned aerial vehicles with added on-board software capabilities. Here’s how the technology works: A vehicle scans an area for active fires and, if a fire is detected, it gathers information about it and passes it on to a suppression vehicle. The suppression vehicle navigates to the fire location and drops a suppressant, extinguishing the fire—with an entire chain of events completed in less than 10 minutes.
After submitting their technology to the XPRIZE Wildfire operations team in early April, Crossfire has now advanced to the second phase of semifinals in October, where demonstrations will be judged by the XPRIZE team of judges in partnership with Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration. The team is now preparing to showcase the autonomous system in the Fall, with the goal to advance to finals.
“Like many other engineering disciplines, fire protection engineering is driven in part by technologies developed in other fields, such as detection sensing, robotics, unmanned aerial systems, and artificial intelligence,” said Arnaud Trouvé, chair of fire protection engineering and technical lead in Crossfire. “This competition pushes us in the space of technological innovation and challenges us to make the most of new technologies for fire safety applications.”
