UT Team Qualifies for International XPRIZE Wildfire Competition

XPRIZE Wildfire's independent judging panel has selected 29 qualified teams from around the world to advance to the next round of the XPRIZE Wildfire Autonomous Wildfire Response track.

Team Texas-Soton is a collaboration between The University of Texas at Austin (UT's Jackson School of Geosciences and Cockrell School of Engineering), University of Southampton, University of Edinburgh, TU Delft and Texas A&M Forest Service.

The team's solution uses a heterogeneous set of uncrewed autonomous UAV systems equipped with various sensors with state-of-the-art motion planning and data processing algorithms to cover large areas, detect wildfires and coordinate suppression. High-performance suppression drones will then carry sufficient suppressants to suppress incipient fires. The overall solution will use a combination of edge computing, radio links and user interfaces to achieve accurate and speedy detection and suppression.

XPRIZE Wildfire is a four-year, $11 million competition incentivizing the innovation of firefighting technologies that will end destructive wildfires so that humanity and beneficial wildfire can safely co-exist. The prize aims to transform current wildfire management approaches through the development of new technologies that can rapidly and accurately detect, characterize and respond to wildfires before they become destructive.

The competition is designed to synergistically transform how fires are managed and fought across two tracks:

• $5M Space-Based Wildfire Detection and Intelligence Track (Track A) will address the greatest barrier to how we currently fight fires by rapidly and accurately detecting all fires across a vast and remote area and transmitting data to ground stations.
• $5M Autonomous Wildfire Response Track (Track B), the track in which Team Texas-Soton is competing, will transform how fires are managed and fought by rapidly and autonomously detecting and completely suppressing a destructive, high-risk fire in an environmentally challenging area with dramatically greater speed, accuracy, and precision than current best-in-class solutions, leaving any decoy fires untouched.

The XPRIZE Wildfire Judging Panel is composed of external experts who possess the subject matter experience to evaluate, verify, and validate the teams' solutions. It includes professionals in fire science and management, fire aviation, uncrewed autonomous systems, remote sensing, engineering, and more.

Each team submitted a Qualifying Technical Submission, a written proposal detailing the teams' solutions to the competition challenge and the proposed plan for meeting the competition goals. The judges independently evaluated and rated these submissions before convening to determine which teams presented the strongest and most viable solutions.

This cohort of interdisciplinary teams will equally share a $750,000 milestone prize purse.

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