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Title: Autonomous AI-Guided Black Hawk Helicopter Tested to Fight Wildfires

Link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/10/2...

Imagine this. Lightning sparks a wildfire, but "within seconds, a satellite
dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm," writes
the Los Angeles Times. "An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms
toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and AI to generate a plan
of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating
constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that.
Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are
smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger
than 10 square feet. "This is the future of firefighting." On a recent
morning in San Bernardino, state and local fire experts gathered for a
demonstration of the early iterations of this new reality. An autonomous
Sikorski Black Hawk helicopter, powered by technology from Lockheed Martin
and a California-based software company called Rain, is on display on the
tarmac of a logistics airport in Victorville - the word "EXPERIMENTAL"
painted on its military green-black door. It's one of many new tools on the
front lines of firefighting technology, which experts say is evolving rapidly
as private industry and government agencies come face-to-face with a
worsening global climate crisis... Scientific studies and climate research
models have found that the number of extreme fires could increase by as much
as 30% globally by 2050. By 2100, California alone could see a 50% increase
in wildfire frequency and a 77% increase in average annual acres burned,
according to the state's most recent climate report. That's largely because
human-caused climate change is driving up temperatures and drying out the
landscape, priming it to burn, according to Kate Dargan Marquis, a senior
advisor with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation who served as California's
state fire marshal from 2007 to 2010.... "[T]he policies of today and the
technologies of today are not going to serve us tomorrow." Today, more than
1,100 mountaintop cameras positioned across California are already using
artificial intelligence to scan the landscape for the first sign of flames
and prompt crews to spring into action. NASA's Earth-observing satellites are
studying landscape conditions to help better predict fires before they
ignite, while a new global satellite constellation recently launched by
Google is helping to detect fires faster than ever before. One 35-year fire
service veteran who consults on fire service technologies even predicts fire-
fighting robots will also be used in high-risk situations like the Colossus
robot that battled flames searing through Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris...
And a bill moving through California's legislation "would direct the
California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to establish a pilot
program to assess the viability of incorporating autonomous firefighting
helicopters in the state."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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