A team from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, here at the University of Sheffield, have participated in the finals of the prestigious XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Wildfire Response $5M competition in Alaska as part of the international AURA Foresight team. Having competed againast 130 teams from across the world, only four teams reached the finals, with our Sheffield team being one of them, and also the only team from the UK to do so.
The competition itself, aimed to stimulate the development of technologies able to end destructive wildfires by accelerating the innovation of fully autonomous technologies able to detect and extinguish fires before they spread out of control. The solution that AURA Foresight provides includes distributed sensing and coverage of large geographic areas, with AI and vision-led robot swarms for rapid detection. Computer vision solutions are key in such rapid detection systems.
Key partners include the University of Bristol, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Sheffield, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, Fire Foresight, Indicium Dynamics, Robotic Cats, Taz Drone Solutions, SkyFly Drones, Southern Denmark University, University of Manchester, and Little Place Labs.
Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova said: “ Our participation in the XPRIZE wildfire finals is a result of years of work on autonomous wildfire detection, development of scientific approaches for vision-led multi-agent systems and embedding them on drones. It is a big achievement to be on the XPRIZE finals and demonstrate how the technology works. A big thanks to the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, to the University of Sheffield, to our partners, sponsors and everybody who supported us.”
The XPRIZE finals brought together experts from different areas at an international level to demonstrate cutting-edge autonomous wildfire detection and suppression technologies. However, the journey continues, and there is still a lot to do for autonomous systems. The University of Sheffield team includes Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova, Sheffield Robotics, Aditya Shrikhande (Research Associate), and James Bray, MEng.