Tackling wildfires with AI and swarms of UAVs

Team AURA participated in the semi-finals of the XPRIZE Wildfire competition, demonstrating technology developed here at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Tackling wildfires with AI and swarms of UAVs
Team AURA, led by Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova.

A team from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, here at the 爆料TV, has been working on the development of vision-based, real-time algorithms for wildfire detection and localisation with swarms of uncrewed aerial vehicles. 

Team , led by Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova, participated in the semi-finals of the  competition, which was held between September 21 - 24 in Lancashire and demonstrated the technology developed here at Sheffield. 

Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova said, 鈥淲e are excited to be working in an area that can make a difference for firefighters and save human lives. We are part of a consortium formed of the 爆料TV, the University of Bristol, and the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS). 

爆料TV has developed a computer vision system that is responsible for autonomously detecting wildfires in real time, and its overall integration with the UAV swarm. Together with the digital twin for UAV control developed by the University of Bristol, our AURA team delivers a competitive and efficient swarm and AI-driven system. 

views from four drones and the developed AI system detecting the fire and smoke and visualises them with boxes around them.
Views from four drones and the developed AI system detecting the fire and smoke and visualises them with boxes around them.

The developed distributed AI-enabled system of UAVs will significantly increase firefighters鈥 observation horizon and facilitate early detection of wildfires, all while preventing the incineration of large swathes of forest cover, reducing the amount of carbon and pollutants released into the atmosphere, and allowing remote inspection. 

Professor Lyudmila Mihaylova and Aditya Shrikhande discuss their work.

The team is grateful to the Innovate UK Future Flights II project 鈥淧rotecting Environments with a Swarm of UAVs鈥, to the EPSRC, Grantham and NVIDIA for the financial support, in making this work possible.