A team from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, here at the University of Sheffield, participated in the XPRIZE Wildfire competition as part of the AURA Foresight team and has been awarded a 3rd place award alongside $500,000. Participating in the Autonomous Wildfire Response track of the competition, AURA successfully demonstrated autonomous and persistent detection, meeting the critical 10-minute detection gate.
The team’s participation in the competition started over 3 years ago, when a small group participated in the first two rounds of selection, competing alongside more than 130 teams worldwide, gearing towards the finals round of the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, held in Alaska in June 2026.
In preparation for the competition, team AURA (Autonomous Ubiquitous Wildfire Response with Aware Robots) joined efforts with Fire Foresight for the XPRIZE finals. AURA Foresight is a consortium comprised of the University of Bristol, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, the University of Sheffield, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, Fire Foresight, Indicium Dynamics, Robotic Cats, Taz Drone Solutions, SkyFly Drones, Southern Denmark University, the University of Manchester, and Little Place Labs.
During the finals held in Alaska, the team deployed its system to detect, verify and coordinate responses to wildfire ignitions across a 270-square-mile (700 km²) wilderness area and launched a fully autonomous swarm of drones to respond to potential fires within 10 minutes. Extinguishing the fires was also part of the task.
Leading the Sheffield team, Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova said: “We are delighted to receive one of the XPRIZE Wildfire awards, which is an appreciation of the team’s work towards real-time tackling of wildfires. This is also a recognition of the autonomous fire detection and localisation technology for swarms of UAVs that we have been developing in Sheffield with data from electro-optical and thermal cameras and in dynamic environments.
The combination of different sensing modalities is essential in order to cope with challenging environmental conditions and dynamic changes of the fire, which often evolves rapidly and unpredictably.”
The algorithms for the fire detection with the on-board UAV cameras, developed by the University of Sheffield were combined with the results from static camera detection from Fire Foresight and fed to the UAV swarm whose search algorithms were developed by the University of Bristol.
With interdisciplinary expertise in aerospace engineering, robotics, autonomous systems, computer vision and artificial intelligence, wildfire operations and field deployment and skilful pilots the team demonstrated real-time capabilities of the technology. It is developing rapidly and we have amazing opportunities to contribute to it. Adopting drone technology in tackling wildfires is not about replacing the humans in firefighting—it is about protecting them, and moreover reaching difficult remote areas at scale.
The University of Sheffield team includes Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova, Sheffield Robotics, Aditya Shrikhande (Research Associate), and James Bray, MEng.