Project Description

The latest data indicates a rising incidence of wildfires, with approximately 2.2 million acres of land ablaze across the United States this year. A dedicated workforce of around 1000 frontline workers is tirelessly engaged in firefighting efforts. The dynamic nature of wildfire landscapes presents an ongoing hazard to these firefighters, who grapple with the lack of secure pathways for entering and exiting the heart of the fire. Notably, last year saw the tragic loss of 96 firefighters, with 20% of these fatalities attributed solely to the challenge of navigating through unpredictable fire cores.

Proposed Solution

To tackle this issue, we introduce Phoenic. An autonomous aerial system capable of flying under the canopy in a GPS-degraded environment to seek out and localize wildfire locations. Our system aims to communicate information back to the firefighters so they can plan entry and exit routes to combat wildfires in such landscapes. It comes with the capability to perform obstacle avoidance in a cluttered environment and navigate with rough information provided by the over-canopy counterpart.

When would you even need Phoenix?

See our primary use case!