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The Rain System “contains wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition”
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoThe surveillance and response part is interesting. I can't imagine drones that size can deliver an effective response. Especially if the fire is in a tree crown (lightning strike) and not in a neat bounded campfire ring. Still, knowing a fire has started is half the battle.
- 71a54xd 5y agoI'm going to be a downer here, and would bet that since this system requires lots of drones flying around to identify fires that it's more likely for one of those sensor drones to crash and cause a fire rather than actually identifying a fire small enough for a few "fire ball" retardants to extinguish an actual fire.
- go_prodev 5y agoOnce the fire climbs a tree I think the balls will lose all effectiveness.
- ta988 5y agoIs there a risk of fire associated with various drone failure modes?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rmason 5y agoConveniently it's a single tree that catches fire with none nearby. Plus the drone is mere minutes away. What if it's densely packed brush and the drone is further away? Or a powerline touches off the fire setting hundreds of trees aflame? Or multiple lightning strikes touches off many fires in a wide area? This thing looks as if will be very expensive and work only some of the time.
- lucasmullens 5y agoExpecting something to work 100% of the time is far too high of a bar to set for fire prevention. If it helps it saves lives.
- shaftway 5y agoI don't think this would even be able to put out a single tree catching fire. Generally the fire is too vertical and the extinguisher would land on the ground and not be activated by the heat, so it won't go off until flaming branches fall down, at which point the fire is too large.
- davidbanham 5y agoYou’re referring to a canopy or crown fire. It depends on conditions, of course, but it usually takes time for enough heat to build up that a fire crowns. There’s generally a period where it will burn through the lower and mid stories and it spreads.
- shaftway 5y agoIn the area they show in their video it doesn't look like it'd take much for the trees at the edge of the clearing to go up in flames, and pretty fast too.
- lumost 5y agoOr the drone's battery/electronics light on fire.... There is no good reason why the drones themselves can't be the source of the fire.
- missedthecue 5y agoOf course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
- systemvoltage 5y agoDrones are horizontally scalable. Instead of one, 50 can go extinguish the fire.
- joelbondurant1 5y ago
- NAR8789 5y agoThat sounds like a scene straight out of factorio. I'm not sure whether that's delightful or concerning.
- stickfigure 5y agoYou're going to need way more than 50, and they'll need to coordinate dropping on a wide flame front. Also, it's not clear what they're using as a retardant - powders and gasses are almost useless in wildland fires. You need water. That said, what would be really useful is a surveillance drone we can send out when someone phones in a smoke report. 9 out of 10 times the call is nothing, but we still have to suit up, drive to the station, get in the engine, and go investigate.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoYou're off by a few orders of magnitude. It's more like 50,000, and that would only work for a very small fire. Water is heavy and it takes a lot of it to counteract the heat generated by a wildland fire. Which is why water is not the primary tool for fighting wildland fires: McLeods, chainsaws, and bulldozers are. Fuel removal along a one-dimensional perimeter is much easier than bringing in massive quantities of water across a huge two-dimensional area.
- 5y ago
- rchaves 5y ago“Rain acknowledges the essential role of wildfire in healthy ecosystems. Read More.” I was glad to see this
- hirundo 5y agoThe more effective rapid fire fighting becomes, perversely there is more demand to tolerate more fuel near structures because there is less expectation of losses. If that demand is met, when the rapid response fails, the fire will be more catastrophic. It's like, having a gun for personal security can be more dangerous than going unarmed if the gun gives you unreasonable confidence.
- tobyjsullivan 5y agoThis is great! Sounds like they are solving the problem of detecting tiny fires in vast wilderness[0]. Detection seems like 80% of the problem. Immediate response would be a huge improvement over the current strategy. That's a win even if they don't solve the drone scaling/deployment/automation problems. [0] https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fire-mapping https://www.rain.aero/missions/software-engineer-realtime-fi...
- svnt 5y agoIt looks like a practical use-case for drones even if the dropping of suppressive poke-balls probably needs improvement. Rough numbers: 3 million acres of forest in USA, one drone could ultimately cover 500 sq km (13 km radius) 6000ish drones call it 10k for redundancy Even at 10k per drone including base station that’s roughly $100M in hardware to cover the entirety of US forestland. PG&E is your first customer. edit: Even if I’m low by an order of magnitude on costs, PG&E is your first customer: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-penalty-of-19b-on-pge-for-northern-california/577625/ https://www.utilitydive.com/news/cpuc-imposes-largest-ever-p...
- gbayes 5y agoI do wonder about the range given the payload is by necessity pretty heavy Also not going to work well with lightening / thunderstorm based ignitions, or in high wind in general
- motohagiography 5y agoPlus, it's a complete aerial surveillance network for wildnerness. What it doesn't prevent in fires it makes up for in policing and governance. Fire marshalls and fire codes have been used for warrantless searches on activists for decades because they have fewer restrictions than police. I once met an environmental investigator in government who was regularly brought in by regional police to do drone flyovers with FLIR/IR looking for grow ops and do paralell construction when they were more illegal as well. Wildfire suppression is a super interesting use case for drones, and one that could scale to much larger UAVs, though the business case for them is plausibly closer to the more general enforcement case.
- Accujack 5y agoIt's a nice effort, but not terribly practical. They can't have the drones performing surveillance over wild lands for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that a crashed drone could start a fire. They also make noise that can disturb wildlife and humans enjoying the wilderness. Plus, they're a ready made platform for dropping stuff from the drone, so immediate military and terrorist uses.
- wildzzz 5y agoHigh altitude, long endurance drones with long range IR sensors to detect flames. Use solar panels and high power density batteries and it could fly around for months. BAE has a HALE UAV that can run for a whole year at high altitudes (PHASA-35). Use a wide angle IR camera for course detection and a zoom camera for identification. Images and location telemeters down to forest ranger base stations. It wouldn't be cheap but at least officials could react appropriately before the fire gets out of control. You could still have these small water drones to keep fires in check before real firefighters can manage it on the ground. You could even cheap out a little on the year long flight UAVs and just run them continuously during the dry season.
- danuker 5y ago> Use solar panels I think that's a good idea, since in general fires start when the sun shines.
- moralestapia 5y agoHi guys/gals, (I know HN typically prefers comments with more substance but) I just want to praise what an amazing project this is and I like how this has a real potential of saving lives, property and ecosystem. I wish you are able materialize your mission!
- hexnuts 5y agoI can totally see this being adapted for crowd control. Gathering has exceeded X amount of allowed people in one area, deploy tear gas and countermeasures.
- mabbo 5y agoThe reason we have such terrible fires now is that we keep putting out fires when they're small. Nature builds up too much burnable matter over time. Small fires would burn it in small, localized areas. But if the small fires don't happen then we get the massive fires that destroy towns, cities, and cost lives. I am not impressed by a new way to put out small fires, because that just ensures bigger fires in the long run. Take those drones and replace the water bombs with extra fuel tanks or batteries, so they can fly longer. Have automated patrols looking for fires daily, so that we can control small forest fires carefully- while letting them burn.
- lnwlebjel 5y agoAlternatively, this allows you to burn when you want to, such as when conditions are favorable to maintain control of the fire. You're correct that preventing large fires is important - control burns must be part of the solution.
- RC_ITR 5y agoYeah, we should definitely put out small fires in August and let (or force) bigger ones to burn in March. Wild how little critical thinking gets put behind these meme ideas like 'historic forest management is the only problem and we should let everything burn'.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoInstead of snark I'd suggest doing some research. The science on this has been solid for about 50 years now. The political will is the problem.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- RC_ITR 5y agoYou think controlled burns during fire season are a good idea? I agree with you that controlled burns are good, but I'm saying a 'controlled burn' is impossible from Aug-rainfall. And sure, letting the entire Sierra burn is one solution, but we have the technology to do controlled burns when appropriate and not let wildfires run unfettered. Those are not mutually exclusive. Hence the 'critical thinking' snark. The answer to stopping massive wildfires is not to stop fighting them whole cloth, because, surprise California's equilibrium burn pre-contact was probably 4m acres/year anyway!
- jwineinger 5y agoHopefully the exploding balls don't fling embers away to start another fire.
- excalibur 5y agoAll I can picture is drones attacking campfires, grills, and hookahs.
- ta988 5y agoIf you do a campfire in a high-risk area you probably deserve your fire to be put off.
- robomartin 5y agoYeah. No. As Mr. Wonderful like to say, take it behind the barn and shoot it. Even a swarm of these cannot compare to the awesome power of small and large (Sikorsky) helicopters as well as medium to large (Boeing 707-class) tanker aircraft attacking a fire. I have lived in fire country half my life. You NEVER get to fires when it's a convenient pile of logs in the middle of an accessible clearing that a drone can hover 20 feet above to precision drop suppressant balls. The more likely scenario is that, by the time it is detected you have to drop swimming-pool quantities of water or suppressant multiple times. And, of course, let's not even discuss a decent amount of wind and everything that goes with the situational awareness that pilots have.
- onychomys 5y agoI do wonder how they're going to get enough coverage. There are plenty of places where a fire might start that are dozens of miles from the nearest road. You'd presumably want to deploy the base camps in some sort of grid, which would mean a whole lot of hiking things in on horses.
- hosh 5y agoNeat tech, but I think prescribed burns are probably better for the general health of the forest ecology. Furthermore, prescribed burn uses a smaller tech stack (less dependencies on high tech) and is more resilient to logisitical and tech failures. Speaking more on resiliency, in permaculture design, wildfire analysis is one of the things you do in a sector analysis when designing a site.
- micro_cam 5y agoI'm very intrigued by the potential for new wildfire tech but as someone who lives in wildfire land in Montana i have my doubts about this video... detecting putting out a campfire is a pretty idealized case. Most fires in our area seem to be started (either by lightning or an improperly extinguished campfire) and then exist as an undetectable underground smolder for quite a while until hot, dry, windy conditions emerge. Then they can blow up incredibly quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxcDxp07okc The current system of lightning strike tracking, inferred overflights, lookouts and helicopter bucket/crew drops works pretty well. They literally drop a crew who can dig down and put out the smoldering parts and then drop a huge amount of water from nearby lakes on starts to get them out. I could absolutely see drones improving the detection of smolders/smoke plumes but the method they have for putting fires out seems like it wouldn't work on buried smolders or anything that had grown too big. I wonder if they have considered something like a swarm of drones that could scoop water from smaller closer water sources and maximize the delivery rate vs the current helicopter and tanker systems.
- quarterdime 5y agoYou have some good points and questions here. I spent 3 summers as a wildland fire fighter and have seen lightening strikes/small fires up to massive 100k acre affairs. I will speak from that experience, but keep in mind it was over a decade ago and it's been a while since I had to think about any of this. As you point out, a tree struck by lightening can smolder for a long time. This can go on for weeks until it explodes on a hot, dry, windy day. To put out a lightening strike you pretty much have to cut down the tree, scrape out all the smoldery bits, and mix them with dirt and water. Then you put bare hands on every square inch of the trunk and branches to make sure you didn't miss a single hot spot. The idea that a few retardant bombs will do anything strikes me as naive. You mention abandoned or improperly extinguished campfires as well. I would love to hear how a system like this is going to confirm that nobody is in the area before basically dropping small bombs in the area. You point out the sophisticated systems of lightening strike detection, overflights, lookouts, etc. While not perfect, these systems are pretty good. Meanwhile the Business Insider article [1] linked from Rain's website says that a dedicated surveillance drone (doesn't carry retardant) covers a mere 40 acres! You say you live in MT... how big is 40 acres relative to your nearest wild land? You suggest drones as a method for delivery of water. Again from experience: you can slow a fire or decrease its intensity by dropping water on it. If you want to put it out, it takes boots on the ground. To extinguish a small fire (like the one in the video), you pretty much have to mix the burning bits with mineral soil and water if you're lucky. Even though we have helicopters and air tankers, we still have hot shot, helitack, and smoke jumper crews. Finally I am also very curious whether anyone on this team has any fire experience. They're hiring, but something tells me I wouldn't be a good fit.
- qayxc 5y agoMeanwhile in the world of forest management: https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
- temp8604 5y agoOn a day where there is actually high fire risk (ie. high wind in hot weather) this system will be too late and not deliver enough retardant to make any difference. In those conditions you will have tens or hundreds of square meters of fire in within that time. Actual fire ignition will usually not be in the open away from other materials as shown in the example. It may be able to stop fires on days when conditions are mild enough to let it run for the ecosystem benefits.
- horsawlarway 5y agoI mean - it looks a LOT like it didn't even put the fire in the video out... Look at the logs as it starts flying back up - they're clearly still burning, even after the 4 suppressants pop, and then they conveniently cut away very quickly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dragonsky67 5y agoJust wondering what the range is on those drones. If you are supposed to be covering 100's of km of bushland you will need a significant number of drones, or they will need to have high speed and long range. Wondering if they would be better having the fire retardant dropped from some type of lighter than air craft or maybe base the drones on a lighter than air craft that can loiter in the area for a significant period, reducing the difficulty in pre placing the drones.
- anonu 5y agoGoing to file this one in the "Amazon Drone Delivery" ideas box...
- dragonsky67 5y agoI wonder if the accurate deliver of fire retardant could be achieved using automated mortars or similar, maybe terminal guidance munition delivered from a high level loitering airship. Your cost may be higher, but I'm thinking that there will be a significant loss rate with drones, and you lose the cost of prepositioning.
- major505 5y agoThe concept is interesting, but would not be easy to deploy the extinguisher agent like they where some kind of artillery shell? Use drones to patrol and find fires, and then just bombard the position from distance?
- awb 5y agoNot a big fan of the noise pollution. The woods are one of the last places we can go to listen to animals, the wind or silence. I guess this is fine if it's only deployed when necessary but I definitely don't want these things buzzing around preemptively.
- anitil 5y agoWhat are those little explosive things they're dropping? Is that a standard fire fighting substance/method?
- tomc1985 5y agoHow are they going to get this thing on-site in 10 minutes? and I have a hard time believing a brushfire in parched areas is going to stay small enough to contain in that time. Have they seen how quickly a room in a house can be completely ablaze?
- eucryphia 5y agoIf they dropped incendiaries during planned burning in cool weather then the fuel loads wouldn’t build up to become mega-fires on hot, windy days in summer. The Australian CSIRO developed a similar project in the 1970’s but socialists shut it down, along with forest industry, to win elections during the 1980’s
- ankaAr 5y agoWe needed that for Corrientes.., more than 10% of the province was on fire..., Argentina, northeast..
- travisgriggs 5y agoWhat could possibly go wrong I wonder? I can only image what happens once people realize this is a new vector for swatting. Wonder if it will get a new name.
- 4oo4 5y agoI really don't get why we haven't figured out how to do controlled burns properly, lots of indigenous cultures had been doing it successfully for at least hundreds of years. And they did it all without fancy technology. I think it might just come down to the arrogance of trying to exert control over a forest rather than work symbiotically with natural processes. I never thought about the liability angle, hopefully legislation can address that to make controlled burns more viable.
- 8note 5y agoThey didn't build immovable homes inside the places to burn
- tamiral 5y agoits actually really cool to see something my team and i pitched as a concept a couple years ago for a grad project now turning into reality with drones.
- natch 5y agoIt looks like the explosive force of the Poké balls is actually spreading embers from the fire. And as they fly through the air the dusty / gaseous suppressant will be blown off, and the hard core of the solid glowing ember will continue flying to a new landing spot where it can spread the fire anew. Oops.
- slater 5y agoDirect link to their video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW_O1WKdMdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UW_O1WKdMdY
- Geee 5y agoIt would make more sense to have this at home. Just smaller one that puts out small fires quickly. Convince regulators that every home needs one. Profit.
- jjtheblunt 5y agoI wonder what historically unnatural hunting of large predators, to the point of near extinction, causes on ecosystems. Does it alter the food chain through herbivores and, in turn, alter the vegetation pervasive, such that it's more combustable?
- bryans 5y agoThey set fire to a pile of tinder surrounded by a rather large ring consisting of a few large branches and logs. Then during descent, not only has the fire visibly burned out on its own, but there was barely any material there to begin with. Then in the extinguishing shot, the fire is all of a sudden raging again, but with a bunch of new wood that wasn't in the original fire. Then at the end everything is completely burned and charred (but still strongly smoldering), exactly as it would look if the fire had burned itself out within its natural boundary -- not actually impeded or stopped in some way. Being able to autonomously send a drone to a specific location is not new. Using a sensor on a drone to detect a certain thing and perform an action is not new. So the only innovation in regard to "containing wildfires within 10 minutes of ignition" that actually matters is how to handle the fire, and they didn't address that part of it at all. Everything about this video reeks of cheap tricks from a children's magic kit, and the whole thing feels like another dime-a-dozen startup scam looking for a quick buyout before anyone realizes they've been duped.
- freshglenn 5y agoIt seems like the extinguishing agent would likely spread embers based on how concussive it looked. I would love to learn the user research yall did. Hit me up if you’d like to speak with a recently retired smokejumper. You’re essentially looking to take them out of business (which is fine by me) but fires are never this small or controlled. They’re usually in an area of 1-5 acres and I don’t see how this setup scales to that magnitude. I didn’t read all of the comments but I didn’t read any that mentioned this.
- ted_dunning 5y agoIf you look at recent California fires, those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) which would make drone flight impossible. Besides, such events spread to several acres within minutes of initiation. Dropping a few water balloons will do absolutely nothing. Other major incidents has enormous numbers of initiating events. Leading up to the CNZ complex, there were over 10,000 lighting strikes in one night in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. These drones would have been completely useless here as well. The video also claims that a single drone can handle 40 acres. There are over 800 million acres of forest in the US. Buying 20 million drones is one thing, but keeping them flying is pretty much inconceivable given how quickly most toys of this sort quit working under field conditions.
- allisdust 5y agoWhat we need is a water balloon shooting rail gun. Useful for targeting from distance and can be loaned out to cops for crowd control when not in use.
- themodelplumber 5y ago> those with single initiating events occurred under very high wind conditions (> 100kph sustained) Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean by "single initiating events"...is PG&E negligence or arson counted? I can name a number of local fires here in rural NorCal that would have been benefitted by drones with this tech. In each case a minimum of 4 aircraft were dispatched after an officer visited the scene. I have to wonder how the situation might be different with a new idea like this. Would it be so bad to keep trying and improving on such concepts?
- kfarr 5y agoThe drones also have sizable batteries. If it crashes in high winds and then starts to burn not sure it’s being so helpful. Then who is liable for that?
- jcrawfordor 5y agoIt looks like they're just dropping Elide Fire Balls, an existing fire extinguishing product of limited commercial success. I'd wager due to their high cost, they run something like $100 a piece... As much as a good fire extinguisher. Of course if this worked that could be a significant cost savings compared to sending a crew, but the Fire Balls are intended for enclosed environments and require direct fire exposure to activate... I just can't see it really being a reliable way to extinguish a nascent wildfire. The video reeks of being a demo thrown together in a weekend. The cuts to debug output are just goofy and the actual fire demo is extremely contrived. The hard part of this, in my mind, is detection... And they don't tell us really anything about how they intend to handle the complex logistics of drones canvassing a substantial forest.
- epmatsw 5y agoI guess you have think of the cost savings vs an actual fire too. $1.6B worth of property destroyed and a $55m cleanup project after the Boulder fires just now. That can justify a whole lot of $100 fire extinguishers even if they’re only marginally more effective (which it’s not clear that these are, just saying this is a problem you could justifiably throw some serious money at)
- jcrawfordor 5y agoThe comment about price was less about this application and more just to explain why Elide Fire Balls are not at all common in the real world... the company tries very hard to justify their higher cost but the advantages they point to are not especially convincing. Dropping them from above might actually be a pretty convincing use-case, but they're spherical and it takes seconds (Elide likes to say 3-5 but it seems often longer in practice) for them to melt through and activate. That means that in probably 8 cases out of 10 they'll roll away from the fire before activating, making them pretty useless. You can see in the Rain demo that they seem to have built up extra wood around the fire... I think this was to stop the balls from rolling off of the fire before activating. In a drone system like this you're probably better off dropping the powder suppressant directly from very low. But that would require more complex custom fabrication of a delivery system. I think "Rain" just used the Fire Balls because of the simplicity of building a mechanism to release them, and not really because of any actual analysis of efficacy. In their intended applications they're supposed to be hard-mounted where a fire is expected, or lobbed at a fire like an old-fashioned fire grenade... but the slow activation time just seems to rule that out as a good option much of the time. The only really compelling use case I see for them is mounting inside of electrical and equipment enclosures for automatic fire suppression, but there are other, cheaper products on the market for that use.
- happytiger 5y agoLook, the use case might be presented as ignition suppression, but I can see this being much more useful for a different use case. I was involved with the Caldor fire near Lake Tahoe, California. That fire had a massive line put in for days, but a big wind caused multiple ignitions behind the line at night. The wind and the night prevented aircraft from flying. But drones like these could have flown. And they could have managed the tough terrain. And they could have suppressed the spot fires beyond the line, and helped that line to hold. And that would have meant potentially saving a city. Don't get me wrong, South Lake Tahoe survived due to hard work and a lot of luck, but as we know entire cities are burning and the loss of that line wiped entire neighborhoods off the map. These machines need to be scaled up to handle significant suppression requirements — something far bigger than these drones capable of helping hold a line and work in difficult conditions. I don't think small drones are it. But precision delivery, and the fact that you get immediate feedback on the effectiveness of the suppression from the drone, could be really incredible.
- RickJWagner 5y agoThat's interesting. But given that heat rises, I wonder how effective it would be against bigger fires. Maybe if it had a little side-launch capacity it could be even more capable?