Killing Bushfires with Drones

Associate Professor Roslyn Prinsley,
Head of Disaster Solutions,
ANU Institute for Climate,
Energy & Disaster Solutions

Associate Professor Roslyn Prinsley, Head of Disaster Solutions, ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions is taking about ways to prevent natural disasters. One of these being worked on at the Australian National University is to detect lightening strikes, resulting bushfires and quickly targeting them from the air with drones. This is a very challenging application as bushfires can start in large areas of Australia, and there can be thousands of lightning strikes which can potentially start a fire. Such a system can't simply water bomb every potential fire. This was at the ANU Disaster Solutions Update 2024.  The event is available live online.

The approach Professor Prinsley outlined was for small spot fires to be detected by UAVs and targeted with water dropped by steered parachutes. Such as system would be similar to those needed to defend Australia. Such a system has to scan large areas, decide what is a potential target deploy assets & assess results. Recent conflicts have shown it is no longer feasible to do this with crewed systems & human decision making. There are too many potential targets to be serviced & too much happening too quickly.