Through the National Robotics Initiative 2.0: Ubiquitous Collaborative Robots program, the United States Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded Georgia State researcher Xiaolin Hu and collaborators a four-year federal grant worth $1.2 million to develop the use of UAS in wildfire management.

The goal of the project is to provide more timely data that could allow authorities to give residents in affected areas more time to evacuate, while also helping firefighters working on the ground.

“This technology has the potential to save lives,” Hu, an associate professor of computer science and principal investigator of the grant, says.

“It will help contain wildfires. It will support fire-spread prediction and inform the decision-making of fire managers as they work to contain wildfires.”

Last year, there were nearly 56,000 wildfires in the United States, with approximately 8.6 million acres burned, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, via Georgia State. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, also via Georgia State, California suffered its most deadly wildfire on record, as the Camp fire in Butte County killed 86 people. The Camp fire also burned more than 153,000 acres, destroying nearly 14,000 homes and more than 4,800 other buildings across Butte County in the process.

According to Hu, the technology that his team is developing can help with these disaster situations in the future. Not only will UAS be able to collect real-time data on live wildfires, but the technology will also monitor the safety of firefighters and other people in deadly wildfire areas.

“One important aspect of this project is to develop human-UAS collaboration where fire managers and firefighters work together with drones in collaborative tasks,” Hu notes.

“By pairing this technology with drones, we are expanding on our previous research and opening up new possibilities that we can only imagine.”

​Research collaborators on this project include Ming Xin, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Missouri, and Haiyang Chao, assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas.